Red Hat recently updated its OpenShift Serverless platform with a handful of new features that inch it closer to general availability (GA). The move highlights both the ongoing maturation of serverless platforms as well as the tepid pace of that maturation process.

Red Hat’s OpenShift Serverless product is based on the Knative project. It boasts many of the benefits tied to serverless platforms like the ability to scale up or down to zero, which theoretically allows for lower operational costs. And OpenShift is Red Hat’s Kubernetes-focused enterprise platform.

The update uses the Knative 0.12 iterations of serving, eventing, and the Knative command line interface (CLI). That’s just a few steps behind the most recent Knative releases that are part of the project’s rapid-fire release cycle. It also includes a handful of other integrations designed to ease use and integration.

Red Hat explained that the OpenShift Serverless product is in a “tech preview” status, which differs from a production-ready general availability status. The tech preview status is the same as it was in last October as part of the OpenShift 4.2 update.

“The fact that it remains in a tech preview only means that it’s not GA and therefore not yet supported but doesn’t signal that there hasn’t been any work on it recently,” the company stated, adding that GA was coming soon.

Despite the limited support, Red Hat boasted that the platform was being used by customers in on-premises environments with bare metal or virtualized infrastructure, and in cloud environments running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

The serverless ecosystem remains a bifurcated environment dominated by cloud-hosted platforms. These include AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Microsoft Azure Functions.

A recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey found that 41% of respondents are using serverless technologies and another 20% are planning to in the next 12 to 18 months. Of those who are using serverless, 80% use a hosted platform vs. 20% who use installable software.

Lambda dominates the hosted category with 53% of those surveyed using that tool, Google Cloud Functions was used by 18% of respondents, and Microsoft Azure Functions was used by 14% of those surveyed. Analysts noted that these cloud giants are dominating the space through the sheer expanse of their offerings and their ability to basically throw in serverless options.

"The revenue in serverless is being made in the application space," explained William Fellows, co-founder and research VP at 451 Research in an email to SDxCentral. "We believe the major vendors are providing serverless hosting as loss-leaders for the add-on services, and the reason some independents have abandoned future investment here."

For the 20% of respondents using installable serverless platforms, 34% picked Knative, followed by OpenFaaS with 15% and Kubeless with 11%.

Knative’s dominance of the installable platform space is a harbinger for why that market remains a small piece of the larger pie. The platform will be coming up on its second birthday this summer, but continues to draw attention by pure open-source proponents due to Google’s hooks into its ongoing development.

Google last year decided to not donate Knative into an open-source group like CNCF “for the foreseeable future.” The company explained that it planned to maintain an “open and diverse community” with steering committee members from “several vendors.”

Google later expanded on those plans, but that seemed to call into question ongoing broad-based support for the project. A number of vendors that worked with Google on developing Knative, including Red Hat, have expressed a desire to see the project move out from under Google’s direct control.

"The industry is making this up as it goes and out of the primordial soup that is cloud native a few strange animals are very likely to emerge," Williams noted, adding that "however, serverless is already a strong gene pool."

This uncertainty has allowed some vendors to come up with their own platforms designed to solve the cross-cloud conundrum. One of those is TriggerMesh, which earlier this year scored $3 million in funding to back its plans of building a cloud native integration platform.

Those efforts look to have a willing market. A recent New Relic enterprise survey found a 206% increase in average weekly invocations of serverless-based applications over the past year. And that enterprises using serverless in production have posted a 178% increase in functions per account.

“Through 2020 we will see the rise of cross-cloud serverless, integration (bringing serverless to legacy apps), serverless programing languages, and the provision of state to serverless approaches,” 451 Research noted in a report.