San Francisco-based startup Iron.io, which recently landed $8 million in funding, has just kicked off a project aimed at defeating the specter of cloud vendor lock-in. Called Project Kratos, the initiative will “enable enterprises to run AWS Lambda functionality in any cloud provider, as well as on-premises”, the company said.

Iron.io already offers a task-queuing program that runs across multiple clouds, and is now preparing a version of that platform that’s able to run on any cloud platform, or local infrastructure, using Docker containers as the basic building blocks of the service.

AWS Lamda is a managed offering for running Java, Node.js and Python in the Amazon cloud. It offers automatic scaling, and can respond to events such as a call to a REST API, cloud storage object modifications and database updates.

The idea behind Project Kratos is that companies can deploy their exiting AWS Lambda functions and Docker container-based workloads in a stateless fashion. A “runner agent” uses Iron.io’s RESTful API to ‘listen’ for work queued up, and cluster stores metadata about each job, such as whether or not it finished successfully. Meanwhile, all the other associated data is managed manually by the applications themselves.

Speaking to The Register, Iron.io CTO Travis Reeder said enterprises need to be wary of being locked-in to a single cloud provider. As such, Project Kratos is an ideal solution because it can be installed anywhere, as can Iron.io’s main microservices platform for job processing applications.

“We believe in open protocols, allowing developers to run their code anywhere, not being locked into any particular stack,” Reeder told The Register. “We have created this layer where you can deploy Lambda functions. Google just announced Cloud Functions and we’ll add support for those.”

Of course, Project Kratos does depend on users having Iron.io’s platform up and running. Iron’s platform provides added functionality like auto-scaling, intelligent workload distribution, reporting and dashboards, the company said.

Iron CEO Chad Arimura explained some of the benefits to enterprises of avoiding being locked-in to a single cloud provider. He told The Register that having full control of where your workloads are running means they can be shifted to a low-cost provider outside of peak times, saving enterprises cash. He also said it allows enterprises to choose specialized infrastructure, for example a particular kind of chipset that’s most suitable for the workload you wish to run.

While avoiding cloud lock-in is a worthy goal, the only problem with Project Kratos is that you’re then locked-in to Iron’s own platform. The best alternative right now is to run Microsoft’s Azure Stack on-premises in your own data center, but that’s hardly a cheap solution either.

Iron.io is currently inviting applications for customers to test the public beta of Kratos, before a public rollout that’s expected in the next two months.

Image credit: Sciencefreak via pixabay.com