OpenWhisk runs as a long-lived service which runs your code in Docker containers. In a way, it's a hammer.

IOpipe can deploy code anywhere, which includes both Docker and OpenWhisk. It's the nail. You could deploy an app with IOpipe to OpenWhisk then run a map-reduce job on the same OpenWhisk cluster, on Docker Swarm, AWS Lambda, or... anywhere

It would be easy to stand up a service based on IOpipe that works like OpenWhisk, but that's just one use-case.