Compute
Where your code actually runs.
11 concepts · 60 technologies · 3 comparisons · 7 real stacks
Concepts
Start with Cloud service models- Cloud service modelsIaaS, CaaS, PaaS, FaaS and SaaS: how much of the stack you hand to a provider, from renting bare virtual machines to just using someone else’s application.
- Platform as a service (PaaS)10 technologiesYou hand the platform your code or a container image, and it builds it, runs it as a set of long-lived processes, routes requests to them, restarts them when they fail and scales them, so you never manage servers or an operating system.
- Serverless functions (FaaS)13 technologiesUpload a function; the cloud runs it only when something happens.
- Software as a service (SaaS)Software you use over the network while the provider runs all of it; for the people building it, one system that serves many customers (tenants) without letting them see or slow each other.
- Virtual machines12 technologiesA whole computer, carved out of a bigger physical one.
- Hypervisors10 technologiesThe layer that splits one physical computer into several virtual ones, each with its own CPUs, memory, devices and kernel.
- MicroVMs5 technologiesA stripped-down virtual machine that boots as fast as a container, with its own kernel.
- Containers9 technologiesYour app and everything it needs, packed into one portable image.
- Container orchestration21 technologiesSoftware that keeps your containers running, wherever there’s room.
- Autoscaling1 technologyAdd machines when load rises, remove them when it falls.
- Actor model5 technologiesMany small stateful objects, each with a mailbox, that handle one message at a time and are spread across a cluster by their ID.
Technologies
Grouped by the concept each one mainly implements
Commonly confused
See it in a real stack
Architectures that use compute conceptsServerless web app on AWSCloudFront serves the site from S3 and sends API calls through API Gateway to Lambda functions backed by DynamoDB.Amazon CloudFrontAmazon S3Amazon API GatewayAWS LambdaAmazon DynamoDBWeb app on KubernetesA load balancer spreads requests over app pods on Kubernetes, which check Redis before going to PostgreSQL.AWS Application Load BalancerKubernetesRedisPostgreSQLEvent-driven order processingCheckout publishes one event to Kafka; payments, inventory and email each consume it at their own pace.Apache KafkaPostgreSQLAWS LambdaCQRS with a static read sideCommands update PostgreSQL; a Lambda projector rewrites the affected JSON views in S3, and CloudFront serves every read without touching a database.Amazon API GatewayAWS LambdaPostgreSQLAmazon SQSAmazon S3Amazon CloudFrontBackground jobs with a queueThe API drops slow work onto SQS and returns at once; a pool of Fargate workers drains the queue at a steady pace.AWS LambdaAmazon SQSAWS FargateAmazon S3Code sandboxes for AI agentsAn agent’s code runs in a fresh Firecracker microVM per task, isolated by its own kernel, with outputs saved to S3.FirecrackerAmazon S3IoT telemetry pipelineDevices stream readings into Kinesis; Lambda writes them to TimescaleDB for Grafana, and raw data is archived to S3.Amazon Kinesis Data StreamsAWS LambdaTimescaleDBAmazon S3Grafana
Worth exploring
All resources →Slides· September 2025How and Why Datadog moved from cloud-managed to self-managed PostgresNick Canzoneri, Datadog, at PGConf NYC 2025Slides from a talk on why a company running hundreds of Postgres clusters across several clouds left managed services for its own Postgres platform on Kubernetes, how it moved a whole region, and what got better and worse. The stack is Patroni (with ZooKeeper for leader election), WAL-G backups, a Helm chart rather than an operator, and Temporal workflows for automation. Useful before you weigh RDS-style convenience against running Postgres yourself.
Article· August 2025lambda to eks pod migrationAWS re:Post community questionA short Q&A on what replaces Lambda’s built-in triggers, SQS polling and scaling when functions move to EKS pods. The useful answer points to KEDA (with Karpenter) for scaling pods on queue depth; the longer answer is an unreviewed AI-generated checklist from AWS’s own assistant, so treat it as a starting list, not guidance.
Article· January 2025How to create Kubernetes Jobs from AWS LambdaCloudfleetA tutorial for a Lambda function (a Bash custom runtime that downloads
kubectl on start) that runs kubectl commands against a cluster, used here to launch a Kubernetes Job in response to an event. It is written for Cloudfleet’s own managed Kubernetes and its CLI, so the authentication steps need changing for other clusters, and passing raw kubectl arguments in an event is fine for a demo but too permissive for production.Article· November 2024Kubernetes for databases: weighing the pros and consKate Obiidykhata, Percona, on the CNCF blog (first published on The New Stack)A short, high-level overview of why companies move databases onto Kubernetes (one platform across clouds and data centres, self-service, scaling, built-in failover) and the three ways to get there: a cloud DBaaS, a private DBaaS product, or an internal platform built from operators and monitoring. There is no technical depth or data. It is a CNCF member post by a Percona employee and ends by recommending Percona Everest, so read it as a vendor’s framing of the choice.
Article· August 2023Using Kubernetes with AWS Lambda: Scaling Up Your Serverless ApplicationsRohit Ghumare, LumigoA vendor blog post whose concrete part is a walkthrough of creating a Lambda function from an EKS cluster with the AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) Lambda controller, closely following AWS’s own 2022 tutorial. The benefits section is vague and blurs what Kubernetes and Lambda each do, and the post ends with a pitch for Lumigo’s observability product.
Article· March 2023The Great Lambda Migration to Kubernetes Jobs: a Journey in Three PartsLiav Yona, InfoQA first-person account of how Firefly moved event-driven work off Lambda (after hitting the 15-minute timeout), briefly onto ECS, and finally onto Kubernetes Jobs on EKS, with practical notes on reusing container images, swapping an IAM trust policy for EKS OIDC, moving environment variables into ConfigMaps and a blue/green cutover. It is one company’s story with few numbers, and the author’s employer sells infrastructure-as-code tooling, which colours the emphasis on IaC.
Article· August 2022Deploying AWS Lambda functions using AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK)Rajdeep Saha, AWS Compute BlogAWS’s step-by-step tutorial for managing Lambda functions as Kubernetes custom resources: install the ACK Lambda controller in EKS, give it IAM permissions through IRSA, then
kubectl apply a Function manifest that points at code in S3. It explains why you might (one GitOps and RBAC model for pods and functions) but, being AWS’s own post, not the drawbacks.Article· May 2021Spice up Your Kubernetes Environment with AWS LambdaLiav Yona, MediumShows how a Lambda function triggered by SQS or SNS can forward events to an internal (ClusterIP) service in EKS through the Kubernetes API server’s service proxy, using IAM-to-RBAC mapping instead of exposing an endpoint, with code on GitHub. A clever pattern, but written for 2021-era EKS: it maps the IAM role through the
aws-auth ConfigMap, and it routes application traffic through the cluster’s control plane.Article· February 2021Alternative to AWS lambda serverless concept in Kubernetes?Stack Overflow question by ajsgA team running everything on Kubernetes asks how to get Lambda-style, per-request scaling for loading AI models from S3. The 2021 answers name Knative, KFServing (now KServe) and Kubeless (since archived), which makes it a quick snapshot of the options rather than an up-to-date guide.
Article· October 2020Is there a way to containerized a normal AWS Lambda function?Stack Overflow question by Sivvie LimA newcomer asks how to move an SNS-triggered Lambda function into a container on EKS. The answers, from October 2020, point to the
lambci/docker-lambda images (since deprecated in favour of AWS’s official Lambda base images) and to Knative; read it mainly for the question, which is a common one, rather than for current tooling.ArticleKubernetes in a microVMsmol machines docsThe vendor’s own guide to two ways of combining Kubernetes with microVMs: a containerd shim and
RuntimeClass that start each pod as its own VM (marked experimental, with its known blockers listed), or a whole k3s cluster, through k3d, inside one VM. Useful for the concrete details, such as per-pod overhead, the /dev/kmsg device the kubelet needs and why Docker’s storage must sit on ext4, but written to sell smolvm.ArticleUsing Lambda with KubernetesAWS Lambda Developer GuideAWS’s short docs page on managing Lambda functions through the Kubernetes API, with either AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) or Crossplane, and the use cases for each (reusing RBAC and IAM roles for service accounts, GitOps, tag policies). It covers provisioning only: the functions still run on Lambda, not in your cluster.