Event Types

Some serverless app platforms are optimized for very specific use cases. Vercel and Netlify are focused only on HTTP apps. Others, like AWS Lambda, support a huge variety of event types, ranging from HTTP to message queues to cloud events. Fermyon’s Spin allows developers to write their own custom event triggers, though only a few event types are supported on Fermyon Cloud.

A serverless app that responds to an HTTP event often takes an HTTP request as input and returns an HTTP response. In contrast, a Spin app that listens on a Redis pubsub receives a Redis message as input, and is not required to return a response at all. So the shape of a serverless function is partly determined by the event that will trigger its execution.

Watch Fermyon developer Ivan Towlson walk through the process of creating a new Spin event trigger.

A List of Common Event Types

The following events are common event types handled by serverless apps

• HTTP, which often includes
  • Cloud Events
  • Webhooks
  • API servers
  • gRPC
• Pubsub
  • Redis
  • Kafka
• Messaging
  • MQTT
• Cron/Time