TriggerMesh launched a serverless management platform that runs on top of the Kubernetes-based Knative platform. This allows developers to automate the deployment and management of serverless and functions-as-a-service (FaaS) across different cloud platforms.

The TriggerMesh platform is offered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Developers are able to manage their serverless and FaaS deployments from the platform to work across different infrastructure environments. This includes the ability to define exactly what runtime is being used by the deployment and the ability to trigger events across different cloud platforms.

FaaS is the breaking up of microservices into smaller, individual functions. Serverless is then taking those specific functions and having them hosted on a cloud platform. The platform will provide a cloud service based on Knative, Istio, and Kubernetes. Deployed functions can be hosted on GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab.

TriggerMesh co-Founder Sebastien Goasguen explained that the platform's expanded control of serverless deployments is unique in the market.

"Most tools in the serverless landscape are currently focused on [Amazon Web Services (AWS)] Lambda," Goasguen said. "We want to widen the choice and help people deploy functions in an environment that they control or on the TriggerMesh platform and use triggers to link their functions to AWS services and more."

He provided an example of someone wanting to trigger an event within Lambda, but being able to access content for that event from either Microsoft Azure or Google's Cloud Platform (GCP).

"In TriggerMesh we aim to give you a large set of triggers from multiple cloud providers and also from on-prem applications," Goasguen said. "This will ultimately give you a more portable serverless workload."

Goasguen also explained that the platform will use Knative eventing that will allow developers to configure cloud provider service event sources like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Queue Service (SQS), Azure Event grid, or Google Cloud storage to mesh together the functions into a cloud native application.

Goasguen led the team at Bitnami that developed the Kubeless native serverless framework. Kubeless is a FaaS platform that runs on top of a Kubernetes cluster.

TriggerMesh joins a handful of companies with management platforms for serverless deployments. Those include Stackery, Platform9, and Serverless Inc.

"What Stackery is doing is terrific and they are leaders in the field, but we aim to bring more choice to the users and let them adopt a serverless mindset out of the AWS Lambda world," Goasguen said.

TriggerMesh’s focus on Knative is unique. The platform was developed by Google, Pivotal, IBM, SAP, and Red Hat, and launched at the Google Next event in July.

It’s an open source set of components that allows for the building and deployment of container-based serverless applications that can be transported between cloud providers. It’s focused on orchestrating source-to-container builds; routing and managing traffic during deployment; auto-scaling workloads; and binding services to event ecosystems.

It’s basically a way to use Kubernetes to liberate management of serverless platforms from specific cloud providers. Many of the current serverless platforms are based on and tied to a specific cloud platform, which can lead to vendor lock-in for an organization adopting one of those platforms. Those include AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.

“I think that Knative is a good step in abstracting some of the primitives away for the developers,” Dan Lahl, global vice president of product marketing for SAP Cloud Platform, recently told SDxCentral. “It really looks like a good way to make it easier for developers to build and deploy at scale.”

James Governor, analyst and co-founder at RedMonk, noted in a blog post that, “Knative will almost certainly become the standard plumbing for functions-as-a-service on Kubernetes.”

While still just a few months old, some big-name companies have already used the platform in a production environment. T-Mobile was cited initially as using Knative to migrate its store locator application into the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We did that in just a sprint as Knative provided a lot of platform-level capabilities that our developers did not have to build,” explained Ram Gopinathan, principal technology architect at T-Mobile, in a statement.

However, many continue to view the platform as still in its infancy. The Knative community just last month released the 0.2 version of the platform.