[EKS + Fargate] [request]: Managed Knative (i.e., competitor to Google Cloud Run)

[bencompton]

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Tell us about your request

I'm curious if there is any interest in building a managed Knative platform for AWS, similar to Google Cloud Run.

Which service(s) is this request for?

This could seemingly leverage Fargate + EKS behind the scenes, but would be better as a new service that doesn't require paying for the EKS control plane and compute resources required to run Knative / Itsio.

Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?

Fargate with EKS is a step in the right direction for a serverless CaaS platform based on FOSS / open standards, but it lags behind Google Cloud Run in certain respects, such as:

• No ability to scale to 0. At least a minimal number of containers must be running perpetually to provide HA in many cases, which can lead to a lot of underutilization and wasted compute costs.

• Fargate would ideally be capable of spinning up a container in under a second to support time-sensitive, event-driven use cases like scaling to 0, where usability is seriously impacted by longer start times. I believe this is not possible with Fargate today due to [Fargate/ECS] [Image caching]: provide image caching for Fargate. #696. In addition, Fargate charges for the time that a container is downloading, which is a double-whammy because not only do consumers have to wait for containers images to download that should have been cached, but also have to pay for this time! A pricing model similar to CR would be more ideal.

• While EKS + Fargate could be used to self-host Knative + Itsio, the consumer would have the burden of configuring and managing this infrastructure, in addition to paying for its required compute resources (Knative + Itsio Fargate microVMs, as well as EKS control plane). The costs could be mitigated somewhat in many cases if Fargate supported options like [Fargate] [request]: Burstable CPU #163, [Fargate] [Task Resources]: Allow smaller CPU/Memory configurations #79, and [EKS + Fargate] [request]: Multiple pods in the same microVM #751 to allow hosting containers with a lot of idle time in Fargate more cost-effectively.

Are you currently working around this issue?

Using EKS without Knative.

[mreferre]

This does not address the ask but I thought I'd add it to this issue for visibility: https://github.com/mreferre/knative-on-fargate

[joebowbeer]

Another repo in this space. A custom lambda runtime:

https://github.com/triggermesh/knative-lambda-runtime