Differences between Serverless Jobs, Containers and Functions

Reviewed on 02 July 2024 • Published on 08 December 2023

Differences between Functions, Containers, and Jobs

Serverless Jobs

Serverless Jobs are designed for batch computing workloads, particularly large-scale and asynchronous tasks, like data processing, image rendering, or complex computations.

Choose Scaleway Serverless Jobs:

For long-running tasks and resource-intensive applications.
To handle numerous jobs concurrently.
If you do not need to expose your service on a port.
For asynchronous processing.

Note

To run as a Serverless Job, your applications must be containerized, which offers you a lot of choice when configuring your runtime environments.

Serverless Functions

Choose Scaleway Serverless Functions:

For stateless and short-lived workloads (< 15 minutes).
For event-driven tasks.
For optimum performance in lightweight scenarios.
For autoscaling applications.
For web-facing applications and web servers.

Note

Serverless Functions can only be written in languages available as runtimes.

Serverless Containers

Choose Scaleway Serverless Containers:

For stateless, short-lived applications (< 15 minutes).
For event-driven tasks.
If your programming language is not supported as a Serverless Function runtime.
For autoscaling workloads.

Note

To run as a Serverless Container, your application must be containerized, giving you a lot of flexibility to configure your runtime environments.