faasd is the same OpenFaaS experience and ecosystem, but without Kubernetes. Functions and microservices can be deployed anywhere with reduced overheads whilst retaining the portability of containers and cloud-native tooling such as containerd and CNI.

• is a single Golang binary
• can be set-up and left alone to run your applications
• is multi-arch, so works on Intel x86_64 and ARM out the box
• uses the same core components and ecosystem of OpenFaaS

Demo of faasd running in KVM

• faasd - itself, and its faas-provider for containerd - CRUD for functions and services, implements the OpenFaaS REST API
• Prometheus - for monitoring of services, metrics, scaling and dashboards
• OpenFaaS Gateway - the UI portal, CLI, and other OpenFaaS tooling can talk to this.
• OpenFaaS queue-worker for NATS - run your invocations in the background without adding any code. See also: asynchronous invocations
• NATS for asynchronous processing and queues

You'll also need:

• CNI
• containerd
• runc

You can use the standard faas-cli along with pre-packaged functions from the Function Store, or build your own using any OpenFaaS template.

If your IaaS supports user_data aka "cloud-init", then this guide is for you. If not, then checkout the approach and feel free to run each step manually.

• Build a Serverless appliance with faasd

• Get up and running with your own faasd installation on your Mac/Ubuntu or Windows with cloud-config

You can run this tutorial on your Raspberry Pi, or adapt the steps for a regular Linux VM/VPS host.

• faasd - lightweight Serverless for your Raspberry Pi

Automate everything within < 60 seconds and get a public URL and IP address back. Customise as required, or adapt to your preferred cloud such as AWS EC2.

• Provision faasd 0.8.1 on DigitalOcean with Terraform 0.12.0

• Provision faasd on DigitalOcean with built-in TLS support

To use private image repos, ~/.docker/config.json needs to be copied to /var/lib/faasd/.docker/config.json.

If you'd like to set up your own private registry, see this tutorial.

Beware that running docker login on MacOS and Windows may create an empty file with your credentials stored in the system helper.

Alternatively, use you can use the registry-login command from the OpenFaaS Cloud bootstrap tool (ofc-bootstrap):

curl -sLSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openfaas-incubator/ofc-bootstrap/master/get.sh | sudo sh

ofc-bootstrap registry-login --username <your-registry-username> --password-stdin
# (the enter your password and hit return)

The file will be created in ./credentials/

You can view the logs of functions using journalctl:

journalctl -t openfaas-fn:FUNCTION_NAME


faas-cli store deploy figlet
journalctl -t openfaas-fn:figlet -f &
echo logs | faas-cli invoke figlet

See here for manual / developer instructions

The OpenFaaS docs provide a wealth of information and are kept up to date with new features.

For community functions see faas-cli store --help

For templates built by the community see: faas-cli template store list, you can also use the dockerfile template if you just want to migrate an existing service without the benefits of using a template.

The OpenFaaS workshop is a set of 12 self-paced labs and provides a great starting point

An active community of almost 3000 users awaits you on Slack. Over 250 of those users are also contributors and help maintain the code.

• Join Slack

• faas login
• faas up
• faas list
• faas describe
• faas deploy --update=true --replace=false
• faas invoke --async
• faas invoke
• faas rm
• faas store list/deploy/inspect
• faas version
• faas namespace
• faas secret
• faas logs

Scale from and to zero is also supported. On a Dell XPS with a small, pre-pulled image unpausing an existing task took 0.19s and starting a task for a killed function took 0.39s. There may be further optimizations to be gained.

Other operations are pending development in the provider such as:

• faas auth - supported for Basic Authentication, but OAuth2 & OIDC require a patch

Pending:

• Add support for using container images in third-party public registries
• Add support for using container images in private third-party registries
• Monitor and restart any of the core components at runtime if the container stops
• Bundle/package/automate installation of containerd - see bootstrap from k3s
• Provide ufw rules / example for blocking access to everything but a reverse proxy to the gateway container
• Provide simple Caddyfile example in the README showing how to expose the faasd proxy on port 80/443 with TLS

Done:

• Provide a cloud-config.txt file for automated deployments of faasd
• Inject / manage IPs between core components for service to service communication - i.e. so Prometheus can scrape the OpenFaaS gateway - done via /etc/hosts mount
• Add queue-worker and NATS
• Create faasd.service and faasd-provider.service
• Self-install / create systemd service via faasd install
• Restart containers upon restart of faasd
• Clear / remove containers and tasks with SIGTERM / SIGINT
• Determine armhf/arm64 containers to run for gateway
• Configure basic_auth to protect the OpenFaaS gateway and faasd-provider HTTP API
• Setup custom working directory for faasd /var/lib/faasd/
• Use CNI to create network namespaces and adapters