Red Hat collaborates with Microsoft on KEDA to enable Azure Functions in OpenShift

Today at Microsoft Build, Microsoft introduced KEDA, a new open source project aimed at providing an event-driven scale capability for any container workload. Red Hat is contributing to KEDA (Kubernetes-based event-driven autoscaling), both via the upstream project and bringing its utility to customers using enterprise Kubernetes and containers with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Using KEDA, we enabled Azure Functions on top of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in Developer Preview designed to behave the same way it does when running on Azure as a managed service, but now running anywhere OpenShift runs, which means on the hybrid cloud and on-premises.

Red Hat will be making Azure Functions available as a developer preview in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with project KEDA to deliver a hybrid FaaS solution that can consume events from Azure Services as well as other additional event sources available in Knative, enabling the accelerated development of event-driven applications on top of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Hybrid, multicloud strategies are now the norm, and collaborating with Microsoft to enable more choice in the hybrid cloud is something Red Hat has done for the last several years.  

With Azure Functions in OpenShift developers can focus on writing business logic using multiple programming languages, including Java and C#, and have a developer experience based on the Azure Functions extension for Visual Studio Code or func CLI.

Users of Azure services (AI, Machine Learning, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure IoT Hub), and other cloud providers can send events through their services and process those events with Azure Functions in a portable way, reducing lock-in concerns. The solution was built with the Operator Framework, an open source toolkit designed to manage services on Kubernetes in a more effective, automated and scalable way, and later this year is planned for availability in OperatorHub.io.  

“The world’s applications going forward need a ubiquitous computing fabric from the cloud to the edge. They need a new app model, that is distributed, event-driven and serverless.” (Satya Nadella, Microsoft Build 2018)

Continuing on a path towards an open future, similarly to the Open Data Initiative that aims to eliminate silos and define a common data model, Red Hat's collaboration with Microsoft in serverless is aimed at doing the same for the computing fabric, helping to unlock customers and workloads and provide greater choice for developers that want to be able to build and deploy applications anywhere.

To get started and learn more visit https://github.com/kedacore/keda.