Kuhiro 10X Faster than Amazon Lambda

 

This is a guest post by Russell Sullivan, founder and CTO of Kuhirō.

Serverless is an emerging Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution poised to become an Internet-wide ubiquitous compute platform. In 2014 Amazon Lambda started the Serverless wave and a few years later Serverless has extended to the CDN-Edge and beyond the last mile to mobile,  IoT, & storage.

This post examines recent innovations in Serverless at the CDN Edge (SAE). SAE is a sea change, it’s a really big deal, it marks the beginning of moving business logic from a single Cloud-region out to the edges of the Internet, which may eventually penetrate as far as servers running inside cell phone towers. When 5G arrives SAE will be only a few milliseconds away from billions of devices, the Internet will be transformed into a global-scale real-time compute-platform.

The journey of being a founder and then selling a NOSQL company, along the way architecting three different NOSQL data-stores, led me to realize that computation is currently confined to either the data-center or the device: the vast space between the two is largely untapped. So I teamed up with some smart people and we created the startup Kuhirō: a company dedicated to incrementally pushing pieces of the Cloud out to the edge, gradually creating a decentralized cloud very close to end-users, a NearCloud.

We decided the foundations of this NearCloud would be compute & data so we are beginning with a stateful SAE system which will serve as a springboard for subsequent offerings (e.g. ML inference, real-time-analytics, etc…). At many CDN edges, we run customer business logic as functions which read and write real-time customer-data. We put in the effort to make a CRDT-based data-layer that (for the first time ever) delivers low-latency dynamic web-processing on shared-global-data from the CDN edge. Kuhirō enables customers to move the dynamic latency-sensitive parts of their app from the cloud to the edge, customer apps become global-scale real-time applications with Kuhirō handling the operations and scaling.

Serverless at the Edge Architecture