Israeli startup Nuweba Labs Ltd. is exiting stealth mode today with the launch of its function-as-a-service offering that aims to address some of the biggest barriers to adoption of serverless computing platforms.

Backed by a $4.8 million seed funding round led by Magma Partners and Target Global, Nuweba reckons its serverless computing platform can overcome challenges around speed, security and visibility that it says prevent many companies from taking advantage of the new technology.

Serverless computing has emerged as a popular new execution model in which public cloud providers dynamically allocate resources whenever a piece of code is executed and only charge for the amount of resources used to run it. The benefit is that developers need to focus only on writing their code without worrying about managing the underlying information technology infrastructure.

But Nuweba’s co-founders, who include Chief Executive Officer Ido Neeman and Chief Technology Officer Yan Cybulski (pictured), say existing serverless platforms aren’t without their problems.

“Current serverless platforms aren’t fast enough, don’t secure the application layer and offer little visibility,” Neeman said. “This leads to poor performance and leaves your most valuable assets vulnerable. We knew we could do better. That is why we built Nuweba.”

Neeman says Nuweba’s platform can overcome those problems Neeman. It’s also designed with ease of use in mind. The company says it’s compatible with all of the major serverless services, including Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Lambda, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Functions and Google LLC’s Cloud Functions. This means customers can move their entire serverless functions to the platform with a single click, without making any changes to their application code.

“Nuweba has an invocation latency of eight milliseconds to 40 milliseconds, which is 10 times faster than measurements we get on other platforms,” Neeman told SiliconANGLE.

Nuweba also comes with built-in application-level security, plus automatic monitoring functions that offer visibility into apps as they’re running in real time. As a result, there’s no need to configure any monitoring metrics or define security policies first, the company said.

The monitoring capabilities should be especially useful, since that seems to be one of the main pain points with companies looking to take advantage of serverless. The problem with most serverless setups is that users cannot easily diagnose any problems that crop up, as they do not control the infrastructure, making issues difficult to investigate. Nuweba’s continuous monitoring capabilities therefore remove a lot of headaches, according to the company.

Nuweba also solves another potential problem for enterprises the company itself hasn’t touched upon, which is the issue of potentially being locked in to one of the main cloud providers’ serverless services, analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE.

“The function-as-a-service arena provides a more efficient way to power next-generation applications, but was until now dominated by proprietary vendor approaches, so it’s good to see more competition,” Mueller said. “CEOs want to avoid lock-in and therefore are looking for third parties to help them.”

Nuweba’s serverless platform is available in beta starting today.

Photo: Nuweba