Keras vs TensorFlow - does Keras have any actual benefits?
Keras used to have an upper hand on TensorFlow in the past but ever since the author is now affiliated with Google all the features that made it attractive are being implemented into TensorFlow you can check version 1.8, like you rightfully pointed out tf.layers is one such example.
I have been implementing some deep nets in Keras, but have eventually gotten frustrated with some limitations (for example: setting floatx to float16 fails on batch normalization layers, and the only way to fix it is to actually edit the Keras source; implementing custom layers requires coding them in backend code, which destroys the ability to switch backends), there appear to be no parallel training mechanisms [unlike tf.Estimator], and even vanilla programs run 30% slower in Keras than in tf (if one is to trust the interwebs), and was grumbling about moving to tensorflow, but was pleased to discover that TensorFlow (especially if you use tf.layers stuff) is not actually any longer for anything imaginable you might want to do. Is this a failure of my imagination, or is tf.layers basically a backporting of Keras into core TensorFlow, and is there any actual use case for Keras?