faasd - serverless with containerd

faasd is a Golang supervisor that bundles OpenFaaS for use with containerd instead of a container orchestrator like Kubernetes or Docker Swarm.

About faasd:

• faasd is a single Golang binary
• faasd is multi-arch, so works on x86_64, armhf and arm64
• faasd downloads, starts and supervises the core components to run OpenFaaS

What does faasd deploy?

• faas-containerd
• Prometheus
• the OpenFaaS gateway

You can use the standard faas-cli with faasd along with pre-packaged functions in the Function Store, or build your own with the template store.

faas-containerd supports:

• faas list
• faas describe
• faas deploy --update=true --replace=false
• faas invoke

Other operations are pending development in the provider.

Pre-reqs

• Linux - ideally Ubuntu, which is used for testing.
• Installation steps as per faas-containerd for building and for development
• faas-cli (optional)

Backlog

• Use CNI to create network namespaces and adapters
• Inject / manage IPs between core components for service to service communication - i.e. so Prometheus can scrape the OpenFaaS gateway
• Monitor and restart any of the core components, if they crash
• Configure basic_auth to protect the OpenFaaS gateway and faas-containerd HTTP API
• Self-install / create systemd service on start-up using go-systemd
• Bundle/package/automate installation of containerd - see bootstrap from k3s
• Create faasd.service

Hacking

First run faas-containerd

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/alexellis/faas-containerd
go build && sudo ./faas-containerd

Then run faasd, which brings up the gateway and Prometheus as containers

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/alexellis/faasd
go build && sudo ./faasd

Look in hosts in the current working folder to get the IP for the gateway or Prometheus

127.0.0.1       localhost
172.19.0.1      faas-containerd
172.19.0.2      prometheus

172.19.0.3      gateway

Since faas-containerd uses containerd heavily it is not running as a container, but as a stand-alone process. Its port is available via the bridge interface, i.e. netns0.

Now go to the gateway's IP address as shown above on port 8080, i.e. http://172.19.0.3:8080 - you can also use this address to deploy OpenFaaS Functions via the faas-cli.

Removing containers:

echo faas-containerd gateway prometheus |xargs sudo ctr task rm -f

echo faas-containerd gateway prometheus |xargs sudo ctr container rm

echo faas-containerd gateway prometheus |xargs sudo ctr snapshot rm