Serverless Functions at half the cost with Spotinst & Serverless Framework

Serverless & Spotinst team up

I am delighted to announce that we have officially integrated with the Serverless framework. An awesome, well-standardized CLI interface for creating, deploying, testing and invoking Serverless Functions.

The Real Promise of the Cloud is Multi-Cloud

With the paradigm of Serverless Compute Functions, we can not only dream and talk about Multi Cloud we can finally make it a reality and implement.

We don’t depend on a single specific cloud provider we aim to abstract it for you. We can always find the best combination of cost, performance, reliability, and resistance to failure, closest to your data that meets your budget.
The key benefits of using Multiple Clouds, especially with Functions are

• Improving SLA and High Availability. Handled under the hood by Spotinst
• Getting the cheapest and fastest compute resource across all the major cloud providers.
• Avoid a single vendor Lock-in

Network, Storage, and Compute costs are coupled. We understand it.

Choose your gear, one, many or just, ALL.

• Amazon Web Services
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud
• IBM (SoftLayer)
• Oracle Cloud
• Alibaba Cloud
• And even, Equinix private data centers

Some useful links to get started

Here’s what you need to get started with the Spotinst plug-in & Serverless now:

• Start here in our docs.
• GitHub repo
• Spotinst Docs
• Ping us on @goserverless or @spotinst

As simple as that

$ npm install -g serverless
$ serverless config credentials -p spotinst -a -t
$ serverless create -t spotinst-nodejs

...
edit your function and serverless.yml file
# generate token here: https://goo.gl/EUF6cG
...

$ serverless deploy
$ serverless invoke -f hello

Invoking function 'hello':
Response:
"hello world!"

serverless.yml

service: spotinst-nodejs # NOTE: update this with your service name

provider:
  name: spotinst
  spotinst:
    environment: env-7ff71541 # NOTE: Remember to add the environment ID

functions:
  AmiFunc:
    runtime: nodejs4.8
    handler: handler.main
    memory: 128
    timeout: 30

# extend the framework using plugins listed here:
# https://github.com/serverless/plugins
plugins:
  - serverless-spotinst-functions

Any Geo Location

Consume compute & network resources, wherever you need it, close to your data sources

• 15+ (and counting) different Zones in the U.S
• 6+ different zones in Europe
• 10+ different zones in APAC and SEA

And again, Network, Storage, and Compute costs are coupled. We understand it.

Everything HTTP/2

Once deployed Spotinst Functions exposes function URLs that speak HTTP protocol. Traffic is only served over secure HTTP/2 connections.

Very Advanced Analytics

Spotinst Functions is built on the promise of Metrics and Monitoring, we expose every single thing that we do, or catch along the way, to you as a time-series metric. In our Console, you will find Metrics for

• Request Count
• Invocation Failure Count
• Execution Time
• Overall Latency
• HTTP 2XXs Count
• HTTP 3XXs Count
• HTTP 4XXs Count
• HTTP 5XXs Count

These Metrics can be filtered and viewed per individual version of your Function (because something might have changed during your last Function deployment, and you want to track it)

Pricing?

Get used to paying 50 to 80% less than traditional Serverless pricing. Due to the fact, that we allocate Spot resources (usually excess compute capacity that Cloud providers are willing to sell at cheap prices) we are able to introduce a new pricing model for Faas Per-Execution Spot Pricing

Pricing Example (Compute Only):

• 500,000 Requests per Minute (21,600,000,000 Monthly) (21 billion)
• 256MB of RAM & Google Functions: ~$10,000 compute time
• Amazon Lambda: ~$9,000 compute time
• Microsoft Azure: ~$8,500
• IBM Blumeix (Open Whisk): ~$9,000
• Spotinst Functions: ~$2,000 (!)

Vast Runtime Support

Spotinst Functions supports the following runtimes:

• Node (4, 6, & 8.3)
• Java
• Python
• Ruby
• Go
• And very soon – you’ll be able to ship your Container as Function. (Just specify a docker image to bundle a Function)

On the work

It can also run in your private data-center! We’re working on an enterprise version that can be deployed on-premise to utilize existing compute infrastructure and turn them into a grid of compute resources serving Serverless Functions for your internal customers within your secured data-center.

Sign up today for Spotinst, and start using Spotinst Functions.

This blog was also published on the Serverless blog.