The 50 Most Preferred Open-Source Serverless Tools

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This article contains some of the best, most widely used tools, frameworks, packages, and modules in building, testing, packaging, deploying, monitoring, and managing serverless applications across private, public, and hybrid clouds.

The Serverless Framework

The Serverless Framework is a command-line tool that leverages services like AWS Lambda and Azure functions to provide automation and framework to build event-driven serverless applications. It is a mature tool that allows you to extend its features and ability via plugins.

It has a community of over 900 contributors and 40k stars on GitHub.

LocalStack

LocalStack is an offline tool that allows you to test your cloud and serverless applications by spinning up core cloud and serverless APIs on your local system. It is a testing tool written in Python and supports all AWS cloud stacks. It is open-source with over 31k stars on GitHub and also offers a pro version with advanced features.

OpenFaaS

Written in Go, Openfass is a widely used tool for packaging and deploying event-driven serverless functions to Kubernetes. It has a command-line tool and UI portal to build and package your serverless code into an OCI-compatible or Docker image and deploy it to Kubernetes to provide a scalable endpoint to event sources like Kafka or AWS.

Firecracker

Firecracker is an open-source virtualization platform that helps you run your serverless workloads in lightweight virtual machines. It offers microVMs designed to provide high security and optimized hardware utilization that can also be integrated into container runtimes such as Kata Containers and Weaveworks Ignite. It is written in Rust which explains its high scalability in running serverless applications.

Chromeless

Chromeless is an open-source serverless Chromium browser automation tool. It allows you to automate browsing activities in the Chrome browser by running the serverless API locally or on AWS Lambda. It is written in Typescript with over 13k stars on GitHub.

Zappa

Zappa is an open source Python package that helps you package a run Flask or Django web apps in AWS Lambda. It provides an easy way to deploy Python web applications as a serverless function on AWS Lambda.

Up

Up deploy web apps, APIs, and websites written in multiple languages like Golang, .Net, and Python as scalable serverless components on AWS Lambda and API Gateway. It is a command-line tool written in Golang that provides simple, isolated, flexible, scalable, and cost-effective deployment of serverless applications on AWS.

Chalice

AWS Chalice is an easy-to-use Flask-influenced framework that allows developers to configure and deploy serverless Python applications to AWS. It is an open-source framework that integrates with other AWS services to provide resources for Python serverless applications.

AWS Serverless Application Model

Like Chalice, AWS SAM is an open source serverless framework developed by AWS. It is a command-line tool that lets you build, test and debug serverless applications locally, and deploy them to AWS.

Kubeless

Offered in a UI or as a plugin, Kubeless is a Kubernetes native framework for deploying serverless applications to cloud platforms. By leveraging Kubernetes resources, it provides auto-scaling, API routing, and monitoring. Developed in Golang, it also allows you to define custom functions with its CRDs, which act like custom Kubernetes resources.

Fission

With its core written in Golang, Fission is an extensible framework that lets you build and deploy serverless functions for Kubernetes. It is an Apache-licensed project that leverages Kubernetes to bring serverless functions and microservices into one pane while providing monitoring, log aggregation, and other features of Kubernetes for easy management.

Formidable

Formidable is a Node.js, JavaScript, written serverless module for parsing multipart form data. It supports multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

OpenWhisk

Apache OpenWhisk is an open-source cloud platform for building and deploying serverless applications. It allows you to create serverless APIs from functions, compose functions into serverless workflows, and connect events to functions using rules and triggers.

Fn

Fn is an open source serverless platform that leverages Docker containers to run event-driven functions anywhere. Even though it is written in Golang, its highly extensible and supports serverless functions written in many other languages with the ability to run on private, public, and hybrid clouds.

Midway

Midway is a Node.js serverless framework written in JavaScript. It allows you to deploy web applications front-end written in React and Vue.js as serverless applications on AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, or Containers/Virtual Machine.

Serverless Offline

This serverless plugin lets you speed up the development of serverless applications by emulating AWS Lambda and API Gateway on your local machine. With a broad user base of over 22k on GitHub, the plugin provides Node.js, Python, Ruby Lambda runtimes, and templates that make development even faster.

Serverless Express

Serverless Express helps you quickly transform your existing Node.js web application into a serverless application and run it on AWS Lambda and API Gateway. It is a serverless framework written in JavaScript that provides AWS SAM and Cloudformation templates and helper scripts to configure, deploy, and manage your serverless application.

Nuclio

Nuclio is a production-ready, high-performance serverless framework that integrates data science tools like Jupyter and Kubeflow to handle data, I/O, and compute-intensive workloads. It is written in Golang and offers efficiency in processing data serverless events.

Knative Serving

As its name depicts, Knative Serving is a serverless framework built on Kubernetes. It deploys and serves event-driven functions in scalable, rapid deployment containers.

Claudia.js

Claudia.js is an open-source serverless framework that enables developers to deploy Node.js projects to AWS Lambda and API Gateway quickly with just a few lines of code. It provides short and accessible commands and compatibility with npm commands to deploy, update, and manage Node.js projects on AWS serverless services.

Embark

Embark is an open-source framework for building and deploying serverless, decentralized applications. It integrates with Ethereum blockchain, IPFS decentralized storage, and decentralized communication platforms such as Whisper and Orbit to deploy DApps as serverless functions.

Squeezer

Squeezer is an open source blockchain agnostic platform for building and deploying serverless, decentralized applications and smart contracts. It is a developer-friendly platform powered by microservices to build auto-deployable and auto-scalable serverless DApps and smart contracts.

Space Cloud

Space Cloud is an open source Kubernetes-based serverless, serverless platform that provides GraphQL and REST APIs for real-time database querying. It is written in Golang and helps you to build scalable and secure serverless applications on Kubernetes.

IronFunctions

IronFunctions is an open source FaaS platform that allows you to write AWS Lambda functions in any language and run it anywhere: public, private, or hybrid cloud-as microservices. It is easy to scale and efficiently utilize resources.

Serverless GraphQL

Serverless GraphQL is an open source set of tools for building GraphQL endpoints for serverless applications. It helps you build scalable and reliable GraphQL endpoints for serverless applications and quickly deploys them into production.

BLESS

Bastion's Lambda Ephemeral SSH Service, BLESS, is an SSH Certificate Authority serverless function used to sign SSH public keys. It is written in Python and runs in AWS Lambda function.

AWS Lambda Power Tuning

AWS Lambda Power Tuning considers data Powered by AWS Step Functions while optimizing your Lambda functions for cost and performance. When you provide a Lambda function ARN as an input, Power tuning invokes the function with multiple power configurations, analyzes all the execution logs, and suggests the best power configuration to optimize the cost and performance of the Lambda function.

serverless-chrome

Serverless Chrome provides the necessary scaffolding and needed for running headless Chrome in serverless functions. It is written in JavaScript with support for AWS Lambda at the moment and Azure and GCP functions in the future.

StreamAlert

Written in Python, StreamAlert is a serverless real-time data analysis framework that allows you to define data sources and alerting logic and utilizes it to ingest, analyze, and alert on data. It provides automated deployment in AWS with built-in log scanning for incident detection and response.

Serverless Next.js Component

Serverless Next.js Component enables you to deploy your Next.js applications to AWS Lambda with zero configuration by default. It offers several side page rendering, API routing, Image optimization, and several other features to make the deployment and running of your Next.js application in AWS Lambda seamless.

AppScale GTS

AppScale GTS is an open source serverless platform that provides developers with a rapid, API-driven development platform for building and running scalable applications on any infrastructure. Built with Python, AppScale offers an easy to manage, serverless, and cost-optimized way of running scalable web and mobile applications.

Middy

Middy is a simple middleware engine that simplifies your Node.js AWS Lambda code, allowing you to focus on the business logic of your Lambda function by providing additional elements like authentication, authorization, validation, and serialization.

chrome-AWS-lambda

Written in TypeScript with over 3.4k users on GitHub, chrome-AWS-lambda is a chromium binary for running headless Chrome in AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions.

bref

bref provides all the dependencies and binaries you need to efficiently build, deploy and run serverless PHP applications on AWS Lambda.

AWS Amplify CLI

AWS Amplify CLI is a robust toolchain that uses AWS CloudFormation to allow you to define and modify configurations locally to help you simplify your web and mobile application development.

Serverless Component

Serverless Component is an infrastructure provisioning technology integrated into the Serverless framework to build, compose, and deploy serverless applications with speed and ease.

CloudQuery

CloudQuery is a serverless tool built in JavaScript. It enables you to turn any website into an API.

OneManager

OneManager is a serverless Onedrive index and manager that can be deployed on multiple platforms, including Heroku, Glitch, and VPS.

Architect

Architect offers a simple, powerful, and efficient way to build serverless applications. It provides a local development environment where you can build scalable database-backed web apps on AWS Lambda.

wave-share

wave-share is a serverless peer-to-peer WebRTC signaling tool using sound. It uses a proof-of-concept for WebRTC connection to share files through sound.

Orbit

Orbit is an open source serverless distributed, peer-to-peer application that leverages IPFS distributed protocol.

Serverless Webpack

Serverless Webpack is an open source Serverless plugin that allows you to build and bundle your AWS Lambda function with Webpack.

faast.js

faast.js is a multifunctional framework that makes regular functions callable as serverless AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions. It also helps in creating cloud infrastructure deploying your code and scaling it with fewer complexities.

serverless-HTTP

This is a module written in JavaScript that allows you to transform your API for deployment as serverless services. It acts as a middleware framework for deploying regular APIs as functions on AWS Lambda.

python-lambda

Written in Python, python-lambda enables you to build and deploy Python codes as serverless functions on AWS Lambda.

BinaryAlert

BinaryAlert is a serverless real-time malware detection tool built with Python. It integrates with AWS and scans files uploaded to AWS S3 Storage buckets.

OpenComponents

OpenComponents, OC, is an open source framework that allows you to build and deploy serverless front-end components. It provides server-side or in-browser rendering for front-end components with HTTP endpoints to their names.

rlite

rlite is a self-contained, serverless database engine with zero-configuration and transactional compatibility with Redis.

KFServing

KFServing is a serverless Kubernetes inferencing framework that offers custom resource definitions, CRDs, to provide highly performant and abstraction interfaces for serving machine learning models.

LambdaAPI

LambdaAPI is a lightweight web framework for integrating proxies in AWS Lambda. It works with JavaScript web frameworks like Express.js and Fastify to optimize performance with Lambda's stateless, single-run executions.