faas-netes Community Edition (CE)
Serverless Functions For Kubernetes with OpenFaaS
Introduction
"OpenFaaS Community Edition (CE) is licensed for individual exploration and hobbyist use. A 60 day limit applies for commercial PoCs. Commercial and production workloads require OpenFaaS Standard or OpenFaaS for Enterprises."
faas-netes is an OpenFaaS provider which enables Kubernetes for OpenFaaS. It's part of a larger stack that brings a cloud-agnostic serverless experience to Kubernetes. This repository hosts the Community Edition (CE) of the provider, OpenFaaS Standard and OpenFaaS for Enterprises use separate codebases and licensing.
The existing REST API, CLI and UI are fully compatible. With OpenFaaS Standard/Enterprise, you have an optional operator mode so that you can manage functions with kubectl and a CustomResource.
You can deploy OpenFaaS to any Kubernetes service - whether managed or local, including to OpenShift. You will find any specific instructions and additional links in the documentation.
OpenFaaS (Functions as a Service) is a framework for building serverless functions with Docker and Kubernetes which has first class support for metrics. Any process can be packaged as a function enabling you to consume a range of web events without repetitive boiler-plate coding.
Pictured: OpenFaaS conceptual architecture
Highlights
- Free for personal & non-commercial use. Commercial use limited to 60 days, then you must buy a license.
- Platform for deploying serverless-style workloads - microservices and functions
- Native Kubernetes integrations (API and ecosystem)
- Built-in UI portal
- Scale to and from zero
- Built-in queuing and asynchronous invocations
- Custom routes and domain support
- Commercial support available
Additional & ecosystem:
- A range of event-connectors and cron-support
- helm chart and CLI installer
- Operator available to use Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) (See also: OpenFaaS Pro)
- IDp integration with OIDC and commercial add-on
Community:
- Over 30k GitHub stars
- Independent open-source project with over 300 contributors, with commercial option available
Commercial options:
- Scale to zero and horizontal scaling - capacity, RPS, CPU, memory, and custom rules
- Multi-tenant functions hosting and Function Builder API
- Role Based Access Control & Single Sign-On (SSO)
- Commercial add-ons and integrations with events like Kafka, Postgres, AWS SQS and Cron
- Affinity and advanced scheduling / security constraints
- Airgapped installation and offline support
- Support from full-time team
Find out more: OpenFaaS Standard and For Enterprises
Get started
- Deploy OpenFaaS Pro to Kubernetes via helm
- Deploy OpenFaaS CE to Kubernetes via helm/arkade
- Read news and tutorials on the openfaas.com blog
- Meet the community at the weekly Office Hours
Technical and operational information
The rest of this document is dedicated to technical and operational information for the controller.
Operating modes - "controller" or operator
There are two modes available for faas-netes, the operator mode is supported for production. The controller mode is legacy and will be removed in a future release. We are unable to support new customers who use the controller mode, and it may not have feature parity with the operator mode.
The controller mode is the only option for OpenFaaS Community Edition (CE).
See also: How and why you should upgrade to the Function Custom Resource Definition (CRD)
Configuration of this component
faas-netes can be configured with environment variables, but for a full set of options see the helm chart.
| Option | Usage |
|---|
httpProbe | Boolean - use http probe type for function readiness and liveness. Default: true |
write_timeout | HTTP timeout for writing a response body from your function (in seconds). Default: 60s |
read_timeout | HTTP timeout for reading the payload from the client caller (in seconds). Default: 60s |
image_pull_policy | Image pull policy for deployed functions (Always, IfNotPresent, Never). Default: Always |
gateway.resources | CPU/Memory resources requests/limits (memory: 120Mi, cpu: 50m) |
faasnetes.resources | CPU/Memory resources requests/limits (memory: 120Mi, cpu: 50m) |
operator.resources | CPU/Memory resources requests/limits (memory: 120Mi, cpu: 50m) |
queueWorker.resources | CPU/Memory resources requests/limits (memory: 120Mi, cpu: 50m) |
prometheus.resources | CPU/Memory resources requests/limits (memory: 512Mi) |
alertmanager.resources | CPU/Memory resources requests/limits (memory: 25Mi) |
nats.resources | CPU/Memory resources requests/limits (memory: 120Mi) |
basicAuthPlugin.resources | CPU/Memory resources requests/limits (memory: 50Mi, cpu: 20m) |
Readiness checking
The readiness checking for functions assumes you are using our function watchdog which writes a .lock file in the default "tempdir" within a container. To see this in action you can delete the .lock file in a running Pod with kubectl exec and the function will be re-scheduled.
Namespaces
By default all OpenFaaS functions and services are deployed to the openfaas and openfaas-fn namespaces. To alter the namespace use the helm chart.
Ingress & TLS
- Configure TLS for the gateway and dashboard
- Configure TLS for functions
Image pull policy
By default, deployed functions will use an imagePullPolicy of Always, which ensures functions using static image tags are refreshed during an update.
If this is not desired behavior, OpenFaaS Pro customers can set the image_pull_policy environment variable to an alternative. IfNotPresent is particularly useful when developing locally with minikube. In this case, you can set your local environment to use minikube's docker so faas-cli build builds directly into minikube's image store.
faas-cli push is unnecessary in this workflow - use faas-cli build then faas-cli deploy.
Note: When set to Never, only local (or pulled) images will work. When set to IfNotPresent, function deployments may not be updated when using static image tags.
Kubernetes Versions
faas-netes maintainers strive to support as many Kubernetes versions as possible and it is currently compatible with Kubernetes 1.19 and higher. Instructions for OpenShift are also available in the documentation.
Contributing
You can quickly create a standard development environment using:
make start-kind
This will use KinD to create a single node cluster and install the latest version of OpenFaaS via the Helm chart.
Check the contributor guide in CONTRIBUTING.md for more details on the workflow, processes, and additional tips.
License
See the LICENSE file for details.
