The Fn Project was originally devised by the team at Iron.io (https://www.iron.io/) under the name of Iron function. After that, the two founders joined Oracle and forked Iron function into the new project, Fn.

Fn is a framework and system designed to develop and deploy serverless/FaaS applications. In contrast to OpenFaaS, Fn does not use any of the orchestrator-level features to manage function containers.

Fn does not only support deployment via its own infrastructure; it also allows you to deploy the same functions to AWS Lambda. However, we will scope only for deploying functions to its own infrastructure, which is, of course, Docker-based.

There are several design reasons behind Fn.

The Fn Project is committed to be open source. It natively supports Docker, which means that we could use a Docker container as its deployment unit—a function. Fn supports development in any programming language. The Fn infrastructure is written in the Go programming language and aims to be able to deploy everywhere, including the public cloud, a private cloud, and even the hybrid infrastructure. Fn allows for the importing of the Lambda functions from AWS and then deploying them to its own infrastructure.

As previously mentioned, the serverless/FaaS infrastructure with Docker is basically designed to effect a balance between controlling the whole system and the ease of maintenance and administration of the infrastructure. Fn also has the design goals that align with this concept too.