OpenFunction: The Best Way to Run Serverless Functions on Kubernetes?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

What do you think about OpenFunction. Does it save us time from combining projects ourselves, or it is a bit too much or too green?

[@lokkersp]

I think it's an excellent alternative to Lambda, kind of "free"(of course, if you already have a Kubernetes cluster). Things I personally don't like: - Lack of documentation. - Gateway API(it's good what they are looking into the future, but it's not here yet)

[@vadimbauer7424]

Really liked the honest take on the current state of OF. I know you can't rush into many details in 30 minutes. It might be something for a followup video. OpenFunction wraps some Knative and Dapr functionality together with a "nice" CRD and glue. So I wondered in what situations would it make more sense to just stick to Knative or Dapr only. I might be wrong, but almost everything I saw in the video could have been done with Knative. The only exclusive OF thing I saw is the various images build CI like things, where Knative functions only have language packs/buildpacks, but not serving.

[@DevOpsToolkit]

That's the thing. OpenFunction is essentially, a project that tries to glue together other projects. Those are various builders orchestrated with Shipwright, Dapr, Knative, KEDA, WasmEdgeRuntime, and maybe a few others. You can certainly do it yourself without OpenFunction. However, since that combination of tools (excluding, maybe, Wasm) is very common, I still have hopes that OF will improve (especially docs) so that we do not have to write that glue ourselves and avoid that each company is doing more or less the same. Hope dies last.

[@martinvang2153]

Great walkthrough!! As you, I really like what they were (are?) trying to do - but it seams that the project is pretty much dead... What would be you advice, if wanting to achieve a similar cloud anostic setup? Building it a simpler version on my own, using much of the same stack as OpenFunction? Or is there an alternative project you can recommend? PS: Very simply put; the elements I seek are: "serverless" go-functions (sync and async), in a event-driven friendly setup (like Dapr + kafka)... Any inputs/hints will be highly appreciated :)

[@DevOpsToolkit]

You're right. The project is mostly dead. Still, the choices are good and I'd use the same tools to build my own variation of it.

[@martinvang2153]

@@DevOpsToolkit Thanks!! Yes, I was kind of expecting this answer - just wanted to check that hadn't missed out on the new great alternative 🙂 I'm going with building my own simpler version. Rewatching the video, catching the hints and more general serverless-on-kubernetes details you also put in there... 👍

[@joebowbeer]

32:30 Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play??

[@AndreaGhensi]

I've been waiting for this! You confirmed my doubts, sometimes in the documentation they don't even spell openfunction correctly 😂 I opted to try to build my platform (not really interested in faas for now, so I should be fine with knative and dapr), but Microsoft just released radius and I'm intrigued by it (except that it format l doesn't use yaml manifests)... what do you think about it? Would you do a video review?

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I started working on the material based on Radius, but abandoned it in the middle since I did not see what's all the fuss about it. It looked like yet another out of many similar projects that do not really bring anything new to the table (but use Bicep to do it). I'll give it another go.

[@martinpetersson6979]

so cool stuff and great presentation . super thanks 🙏

[@zous89]

Love It, Great Video, Awesome presentation!!!

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@jemag]

Hey Viktor, would you be open to use "bat" instead of cat in your videos? I feel like the yaml and code snippets would be much easier to read with proper syntax highlighting

[@DevOpsToolkit]

I'm trying to assume a bare minimum so that people can follow the Gist without having to install anything beyond what's the subject of the video and `bat`, for example, is not part of the Mac default setup (not sure about Windows). As a matter of fact, when I work (for real), I don't use iTerm but VS Code terminal, Oh My ZSH instead of Bash, a bunch of CLIs and shortcuts, etc. That being said, it should not be an issue to add the instructions to install `bat` to Gists, but the other issue is that I'm putting terminal as an overlay with a transparent background. That part is done during editing and I'm afraid that editor would have a hard time to do it (easily) if it would be full of colors. I'll think about it and make a few tryouts to see how it goes. P.S. It might make more sense to do `cat something.yaml | yq .` since `yq` is already a requirement for many of the videos (as well as `jq`).

[@fpvclub7256]

Here is a silly question - My organization won't allow us to use K8s for a project because they believe it will slow the project down and increase the risk. They will only allow container images to be run using PodMan. What is the best way currently to deploy/update/containers deployed on remote VM's ? Anything other than docker pull && docker restart would be great. Thnx

[@DevOpsToolkit]

When self-managed setup are concerned (NOT SaaS), everything is Kubernetes. That's the base platform for almost all projects and vendors. The only alternatives to it that got any tractions are Mesos (dead), Docker Swarm (life-support), and HashiCorp Nomad (never go any real traction). Now, if you add to that the requirement that only Podman is allowed, you truly do not have many (if any) options beyond Podman itself which was not meant to run as production anyways.

[@alvsanand]

Great video!!! However, I must say that this project has one of the worst documentation I have come across in the CNCF...

[@DevOpsToolkit]

Oh yeah. That was one of my main complaints. It's impossible to find the info in the docs and I had to go through code or docs of projects it integrates. Docs are horrible.

[@jonaszasut17]

@alvsanand I have to agree, I've decided to go through code after spending some time reading the docs

[@hubstrangers3450]

Thank you.....[ OS + Container + Talos + K8 + OpenFunction ] => Workspace.......this is possible take it, would be kind enough to demo similar example, if time permits....thx