Serverless Functions, Lock-in, and MDBs

[monsonhaefel]

The use of serverless functions is growing quickly and developers have many choices but each choices requires a lock-in to a non-standardized solution. For example the leading serverless function platforms are AWS Lambda, Google Functions, Fn, and Azure Functions they all support functions written in Java. They all have very similar Java component models except that you cannot easily port code from one model to the other so developers must choose which platform is the best fit and stick with it.

Message-Driven beans are very similar to serverless functions except that they are dedicated to JMS, message-oriented-middleware, rather than being generalized for any type of event, so you can't use MDBs to process, for example, streaming data or events generated by file systems or databases out of the box. A messaging server must be used between the event generator and the bean. Most serverless function platforms do provide this capability, but again there is vendor lock in and no standard.

A standardized solution for serverless funcitons within the Jakarta EE platform would go a long ways to solving the vendor lock-in problem, but none exists at this time.

[m-reza-rahman]

This is a good thought and certainly worth pursuing. I will see if I can get someone from the Azure Functions team to weigh in.

Reza Rahman
Principal Program Manager
Java on Azure

Please note that views here are my own as an individual community member and do not represent the views of my employer.