What is Lithops?#

Lithops is a Python multi-cloud serverless computing framework. It allows to run unmodified local python code at massive scale in the main serverless computing platforms.

Lithops delivers the user’s code into the cloud without requiring knowledge of how it is deployed and run. Moreover, its multicloud-agnostic architecture ensures portability across cloud providers, overcoming vendor lock-in.

Lithops provides great value for data-intensive applications like Big Data analytics and embarrassingly parallel jobs.

It is specially suited for highly-parallel programs with little or no need for communication between processes.

Examples of applications that run with Lithops include Monte Carlo simulations, deep learning and machine learning processes, metabolomics computations, and geospatial analytics, to name a few.

Lithops facilitates consuming data from object storage (like AWS S3, GCP Storage or IBM Cloud Object Storage) by providing automatic partitioning and data discovery for common data formats like CSV.

Lithops abstracts away the underlying cloud-specific APIs for accessing storage and provides an intuitive and easy to use interface to process high volumes of data.

Use any Cloud#

Lithops provides an extensible backend architecture that is designed to work with different compute and storage services available on Cloud providers and on-premise backends.

In this sense, you can code your application in Python and run it unmodified wherever your data is located at: IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Aliyun…

Available backends

Quick Start#

Lithops is available for Python 3.6 and up. Install it using pip:

pip install -U lithops

You’re ready to execute a simple example!

from lithops import FunctionExecutor

def hello(name):
    return 'Hello {}!'.format(name)

with FunctionExecutor() as fexec:
    fut = fexec.call_async(hello, 'World')
    print(fut.result())

Additional resources#

Blogs and Talks#

Papers#