Faas: Proposal: "Serverless Inc. framework plugin" for OpenFaaS

[alexellis]

Serverless Inc framework provides a CLI / abstraction to public cloud, but they do not appear to have any Docker or Swarm backed providers.

Related: https://github.com/alexellis/faas/issues/58

Help wanted from community.

Research:

Run a spike / PoC to integrate with serverless project:

Repo & skeleton created:

• https://github.com/alexellis/serverless-faas

Goals:

• Identify missing endpoints/API in FaaS and back-fill
• Explore pros/cons of maintaining Serverless Inc Plugin over FaaS' own CLI
• Understand security / api/secret key etc requirements for self-hosted vs managed (cloud) function service.

[alexellis]

Documentation from Serverless project on creating new provider was sparse. I was able to bootstrap the framework, but it requires a PR to their core project due to whitelist of provider names etc.

Parking issue for now in favour of faas-cli YAML - with similar format.

[alexellis]

@aafrey I've re-opened this to track progress.

[austinfrey]

initial commands are functional. I'll have more time to spend on it this weekend to clean things up.

[austinfrey]

I've updated build to be package to be inline with other providers. Also, using the create command would require a PR to serverless to include the OpenFaaS templates, it can't be over-ridden like some of other commands, instead we could use the install command to pull templates from github, rather than using create. this is partly why I lobbied for separate template repos here: https://github.com/alexellis/faas-cli/issues/85 but I'd only really recommend that change if it made the most sense for OpenFaaS across the board. thoughts?

I also added a custom init command to launch the OpenFaaS framework for funsies.

[austinfrey]

summarizing a thread from slack:

• Is it necessary to return a promise in the various plugin commands? (deploy, package, etc) it does not seem to have an impact when removed on the forked_cmds branch
• there are two options to generating function boilerplate with the Serverless framework: 1) create requires a PR to the main Serverless repo to add the OpenFaaS templates. 2) install pulls function templates from a specific GitHub repo, this seems the fastest way but would require individual repo's for each function template.
• I also created a new branch called http_cmds which implements the commands using http requests to the OpenFaaS Gateway API rather than spawning/forking the faas-cli. After experimenting, I think this way is actually the best. it offers mores flexibility and more reliable/predictable behavior. Since the serverless framework uses promises heavily, streaming functions don't seem to behave as well, and spawn pipes stream data to stdout ad stderr.
• There seems to be a long delay when running the deploy and package commands. watching the cli output, it stalls at this step Serverless: Excluding development dependencies... which makes me think this is a serverless issue when packaging plugins. Error comes from this line in the serverless/serverless repo.

any feedback regarding the above is appreciated.
cc @alexellis

[alexellis]

Derek add label: priority/low

[alexellis]

I hope to sit down with this next week @aafrey

[javajon]

Just a vote here.

In reviewing Kubeless it is nice to see this serverless.com plugin.

Adding a plugin for OpenFaaS may add more momentum.

(Along the lines of momentum, also a stable helm chart for faas-netes)

[austinfrey]

@javajon. Thanks for the interest. Feel free to give it a try. It needs updated to match certain newer changes but it's functional as an MVP. https://github.com/openfaas/serverless-openfaas

[alexellis]

Hi @javajon, for context about momentum this analysis from The New Stack may be helpful - https://thenewstack.io/aws-lambda-still-towers-competition-much-longer/

There is a stable helm chart in our repository with instructions for how to get started and about available settings/flags. We're also doing the necessary to get it listed "upstream" in the charts repo. If you would like to be involved / help with either please shout.

The serverless framework's CLI is generally slow for every provider. You'll find a richer experience with the OpenFaaS CLI which was built for serverless with containers in mind and in Golang rather than with Cloud providers in mind.

@austinfrey which "newer changes" does it need updating for?

[alexellis]

Derek close: inactivity