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TriggerMesh Aims to Orchestrate Serverless Computing on Kubernetes

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by Mike Vizard

TriggerMesh has raised $3 million in additional funding to advance the integration of Kubernetes clusters with serverless computing frameworks. In addition, the company announced it has made available open source integrations between its namesake orchestration for serverless computing frameworks and IBM MQ event sources, VMware vSphere event sources and the Microsoft Azure Event Hub channel controller.

The TriggerMesh platform provides access to a cloud bus to facilitate application flow orchestration and the consumption of events emanating from any data center application or cloud source. It is designed to trigger serverless functions using a declarative application programming interface (APIs) and a set of tools for defining event flows and functions.

Company co-founder Mark Hindle says that as IT organizations embrace modern application development platforms, a transition is occurring in terms of how stateless and stateful applications are constructed. Initially, organizations limited container use to building stateless applications. Now, however, many stateless applications are being built using functions that access serverless computing frameworks.

At the same time, however, larger numbers of stateful applications built using containers are being deployed on Kubernetes clusters both on-premises and in public clouds. Those stateful applications will need to be integrated with stateless applications running on serverless computing frameworks that could be invoked via the cloud or in an on-premises IT environment.

Interest in serverless computing frameworks such as Lambda provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) is running high because they provide developers an opportunity to reduce the amount of code in their applications to process functions that might be needed only occasionally. Via an application programming interface (API) call, developers could, for example, invoke an analytics function running externally to their application.

Hindle says it’s only a matter of time before integration platforms built around serverless computing frameworks such as TriggerMesh supplant first-generation integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environments that were built to support legacy application architectures.

It’s unclear how integration will evolve in the age of microservices, but the next era of cloud computing is likely to be more complicated as dependencies between services increase. The need for some means of orchestrating all those dependencies is becoming more apparent daily.

Unfortunately, serverless computing standards, de facto or otherwise, are a work in progress. Google and its allies are making a case for a set of open source Knative middleware that integrates Kubernetes clusters with any number of open serverless computing frameworks. However, the adoption of open serverless computing frameworks is still relatively nascent. The most widely used serverless computing framework is the proprietary AWS Lambda service. However, the adoption of rival frameworks is expected to increase substantially in 2020—a report published this week by Allied Market Research predicts the global serverless architecture market will reach $22 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate of 27.8% between 2018 and 2025.

It may be too early to say with that level of precision how big demand for serverless computing really will be. Safe to say, however, it’s going to be huge.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a veteran IT journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the technology industry, having previously served as Editor-in-Chief of both CRN and InfoWorld and as editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he oversaw titles including eWEEK, CIO Insight and Baseline. Over his career he has also edited or contributed to a wide range of enterprise technology publications, including IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, ComputerWorld, TMCNet and Digital Review, and he later led editorial for CTOEdge.com. His reporting and analysis span software development, cloud computing, cybersecurity, IT channel strategy and, more recently, artificial intelligence and DevOps practices. A recognized voice in enterprise IT journalism, Vizard is known for tracking emerging technology trends as they move from early adoption into mainstream enterprise use. He now serves as Chief Content Officer for Techstrong Group, where he oversees editorial strategy across the full network — DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native Now, Digital CxO, Techstrong.ai, TechStrong.IT, Techstrong Semi and PlatformEngineering.com — in addition to writing and hosting content for Techstrong TV and the Techstrong Gang podcast.

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