Iguazio has thrown its hat into the serverless computing space with bold claims of performance that outpaces segment heavyweight Amazon Web Services (AWS) while also stripping out enterprise concerns over vendor lock-in.

The company’s efforts to disrupt the establishment are with its recently launched Nuclio serverless platform. Nuclio is set to battle established players in the space, including AWS’ Lambda, Microsoft’s Azure Functions, IBM’s OpenWhisk, and Oracle’s FN.

Nuclio is offered as either a managed service or through an open source model. It can be run as a standalone option for use in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, packaged within a Docker container, or can be integrated with a container orchestrator like Kubernetes. It also uses Kubernetes Secrets for security and can run the Kubernetes command line interface (CLI) to monitor functions.

Iguazio CTO Yaron Haviv said Nuclio can process up to 400,000 events per second, compared to just 2,000 events per second from Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Lambda. He noted this was possible because Nuclio exposes the serverless processes up to 100-times faster than AWS.

Haviv did admit that Nuclio was not yet as mature as Lambda, but that in a few months “it can be used in production.”

Haviv also threw shade at OpenWhisk and Oracle. He noted the former was "extremely complicated" and that most would not choose IBM for a "neutral-host offering." The latter was claimed to be to slow and challenging to implement.

Beyond the claimed performance benefits, Haviv said Nuclio also outpaces its rivals because of its ability to help enterprises avoid vendor lock-in. This is due to the platform’s open source architecture that allows for portability across cloud offerings.

“Enterprise are being challenged by being locked in by Amazon,” Haviv said. “[Nuclio] is a breakthrough in the serverless ecosystem and we call on the serverless community to join us.”

Iguazio has presented Nuclio to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Serverless Working Group in an attempt to drum up support from the open source community.

Iguazio was founded by former XtremeIO executive Yaron Segev and former Mellanox executive Asaf Somekh in 2014. The company last summer scored $33 million in a Series B funding round, pushing its total haul to $48 million.

Iguazio’s platform also comes at a time when large organizations are being singled out for serverless use cases.

AWS, which is viewed by most as a leader in the serverless space, has highlighted use cases by Thomson Reuters, Expedia, and Netflix.

Redmonk analyst Fintan Ryan noted that growing uptake by some large enterprise customers is legitimizing serverless as an option.

“None of these use cases are trivial – they are at significant scale, and with real revenue attached to them,” Ryan wrote in a blog post.

Ryan noted that from conversations, a majority of serverless application workloads are being run on Lambda. Microsoft’s Azure Functions is also getting some attention with Google’s Cloud Functions “running a distant third.”

As an interesting side note, Ryan wrote that he has also heard of enterprise developers looking to bypass work on container platforms and moving straight to serverless architectures “for suitable applications.”

“We expect this trend to pick up pace over the coming twelve to eighteen months, but with various teething problems as developers adopt to this new paradigm and reach decisions on what programming languages and frameworks they find to be productive,” Ryan explained.