Announcing the OpenFaaS Function Store | Hacker News Reader

Announcing the OpenFaaS Function Store

blog.alexellis.io

60 pointsalexellisuk17 comments

Stefan's function is pretty cool but it sounds like you guys are up for the challenge of submitting something even better to the store. Looking forward to seeing your PRs - get creative! https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/93589059037769728...

Really cool to see! I did feel the need to make this one correction though

> when you're LetsEncrypt SSL certificate

This should be "your."

Fixed

How can this compete with the recently announced AWS Serverless App Repo? [0]

That service is still in preview (and they may not be whitelisting folks yet), but it sure seems like it could be a category killer.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/serverlessrepo/

Maybe you're running on non-AWS cloud or on-prem. Maybe you want to run a function that is written in a language that isn't supported by Lambda. Maybe your function is too complex for Lambda or would be too expensive. Maybe you already have a Kubernetes cluster running so deploying OpenFaaS is trivial and comes at no additional cost.

This is a great way to quickly and easily try out OpenFaaS by seeing some of the things OF functions can do with nearly no setup!

It has all the important functions like left-pad.

We need your functions zimbatm - whether light-hearted like left-pad or more involved like the TensorFlow + imagenet example

> One of my favourite functions (certinfo) reports back on when you're LetsEncrypt SSL certificate is going to expire. How handy is that?

I can't help but feel that this is over-engineering to its highest degree. What is a calendar for? Create an event in Google Calendar or whatever and have it notify you a few days in advance. Completely non-technical solution that everybody already knows how to do.

Not at all. Let's say you manage 100 machines, possibly for different domains, and each generates their own certs. Now you probably want monitoring that alerts you when the certificate is about to expire in the next 20 days (you can renew them 30 days before they expire, without running into rate limit shenanigans).

With 100 servers, you'll have on average about two calendar entries per day, most of which are no-ops, because the certificate renewal worked fine.

You certainly do not need "infinite scaling" to do that. Just a queue of workers running on a dumb server or even just a crontab... Yes it is the very definition of over engineering.

No, you don't need "infinite scaling" for just that. But if you have a FaaS-Setup anyway, you might as well reuse it for such relatively simple (but still useful) tasks.

A full Linux kernel and cron daemon for that? You could run it on an ESP32!

You know that LE will email you if a cert isn't automatically renewed, right?

Anecdotally, the case of "certificate renewed, but setup not properly configured to reload all services afterwards" happens quite a bit.

See also: updating vulnerable library packages but not restarting dependent daemons.

Wasn't the whole point of LetsEncrypt's short certificate expiration period to promote setting up automatic renewal?

So no more calendar reminders every year, having to look up what's the correct order to concatenate comodo's chain and so on.

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