faas - Functions As A Service

FaaS is a platform for building serverless functions on Docker Swarm Mode with first class metrics. Any UNIX process can be packaged as a function in FaaS enabling you to consume a range of web events without repetitive boiler-plate coding.

Concept

• Each container has a watchdog process that hosts a web server allowing a JSON post request to be forwarded to a desired process via STDIN. The respose is sent to the caller via STDOUT.
• A gateway provides a view to the containers/functions to the public Internet and collects metrics for Prometheus and in a future version will manage replicas and scale as throughput increases.

Minimum requirements:

• Docker 1.13 (to support attachable overlay networks)
• At least a single host in Swarm Mode. (run docker swarm init)

TestDrive

You can test-drive FaaS with a set of sample functions as defined in docker-compose.yml on play-with-docker.com for free, or on your own laptop.

• Begin the TestDrive instructions

Roadmap and contributing

• Read the Roadmap

Develop your own functions

• Read the Roadmap

Would you prefer a video overview?

See how to deploy FaaS onto play-with-docker.com and Docker Swarm in 1-2 minutes. See the sample functions in action and watch the graphs in Prometheus as we ramp up the amount of requests.

• Deep Dive into Functions as a Service (FaaS) on Docker

Prometheus metrics are built-in

Prometheus is built into FaaS and the sample stack, so you can check throughput for each function individually with a rate function in Prometheus like this:

More resources:

FaaS is still expanding and growing, check out the developments around:

• Auto-scaling
• Prometheus alerts
• More sample functions
• Brand new UI