Introduction: CaaS

Evaluating serverless solutions

The following list represents features and abilities we believe are essential when evaluating serverless solutions:

• It should allow local development.
• It should leverage common and widely accepted denominators such as container images.
• It should be based on some sort of a standard.
• It shouldn’t be too restrictive.
• It should support (almost) any type of applications.

None of those items from our wish list exclude those we mentioned earlier. Instead, they complement the basic features of managed serverless services that allow us to avoid dealing with infrastructure, scaling, and high availability, and to pay for what we use. We can say that those are basic needs, while the items in our wish list are things that we value a lot, and can be used to evaluate which solution is a better fit for our needs.

That’s enough on our part. It’s time to jump into practical examples of yet another flavor of serverless deployments and see which use cases it might serve well. Let’s explore managed Containers as a Service (CaaS).

Note: We’ve made a bold statement by saying CaaS is a flavor of serverless. That might not be the case, so take that statement with a healthy dose of skepticism.