IBM Corp. has updated its OpenWhisk serverless computing service to provide high-order management functions for developers building application programming interfaces.

APIs are one of the most common use cases for serverless compute platforms, which are designed for developers who don’t want to worry about the underlying infrastructure they’re using. The best-known serverless compute platform is probably Amazon Web Services’ Lambda, which can grow and scale according to developer’s needs.

These days all of the major cloud providers offer a serverless computing option. Microsoft Corp. has Azure Functions and Google Inc. offers Cloud Functions. But IBM said its rivals do not provide management functions for API development.

The newly updated OpenWhisk service on Bluemix tackles the issue with lifecycle management tools for APIs built using the platform. These tools help OpenWhisk integrate with IBM’s API Connect service, which was released last year. With API Connect, developers can manage APIs through multiple stages of their lifecycle, from creation to running, to management and analysis.

Using API Connect, developers can create APIs on OpenWish with Swagger definitions. API versioning per product is also built into the system, together with the ability to separate APIs for different purposes.

With the update, IBM is promoting OpenWhisk – an Apache Software Foundation project – as a better target for serverless deployment. Just like with containers built on open-source technologies, IBM says its open-source OpenWhisk solution offers more appeal as a long-term development platform than proprietary alternatives. That’s because the main value of using an open-standard platform in the cloud is that it’s easier to deploy on multiple public clouds without needing to rework the development for each platform.

OpenWhisk can do this because it provides an open-source foundation for function-as-a-service, in the same way that Kubernetes provides an open-source base for container orchestration services.

“We’ve been steadily building OpenWhisk to give developers a truly open serverless platform, which increases their ability to build and use transformative services such as cognitive and IoT,” Jason McGee, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, IBM Cloud Platform, said in a statement. “Today’s news further readies OpenWhisk for the enterprise, making it easier to use more securely and in concert with outside code, data and systems.”

IBM is clearly trying to use open-source as a way of differentiating OpenWhisk from other serverless computing platforms, but it remains to be seen if customers will care. Thanks to the rise of third-party solutions such as the Serverless Framework, the differences between serverless offerings are gradually being abstracted away. The Serverless Framework already supports IBM OpenWhisk, and is based on a plugin architecture that should make it possible to add support for services like API Connect to other platforms.

Image: Efraimstochter/pixabay