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Comment by gsvclass | Hacker News Reader

Checkout SanFran - Lambda like serverless functions platform for Kubernetes https://github.com/dosco/sanfran

The main focus of its design was fast function startup time and horizontal scaling.

Fast function startup is done with a combination of pool of warm containers and instant container recycling.

As for horizontal scaling functions can themselves scale horizontally in high QPS situations and for large deployments every micro-service that makes up SanFran can itself be scaled horizontally.

Currently working on using machine learning to predictions to manage warm container pools.

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For anyone looking to try this out I would recommend Google Kubernetes cluster (choose the cheap preemptive vm machine type) and you can have a 5 node Kubernetes cluster running for less than 10 bucks a month. Google's new pricing means they don't charge for Kubernetes just for the instances. SanFran can be installed with a single Helm command.

helm install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dosco/sanfran/master/helm-...

eh... why should I need a "serverless functions platform for Kubernetes" especially since I actually need servers for kubernetes. and I can probably do most stuff way easier than having a framework on top of another deployment/app scheduling framework.

A serverless functions platform like SanFran can be deployed on your existing Kubernetes cluster. It will sit besides all your existing apps on there using resources only when needed. You can have many more services (functions) running / deployed than the size of your cluster.

It can be a way for anyone within the organization to deploy a function they need. For example marketing needs a quick endpoint to handle Mailchimp registrations or for Stripe payments. The function will not take up resources on the cluster until its needed. Functions will run in a isolated, devops free environment.

Technically you're not running on top of another framework, your javascript function is just running in a NodeJS instance thats managed there are no extra layers. Your NodeJS instance is running on Kubernetes but then why do I need Kubernetes is an entirely different discussion.

There are several of these for kubernetes already, kubeless, fission, openwhisk. Seems like instead of starting yet another one of these projects contributing might be a better way to go.

So what do you think of the posted project?

From taking a quick look its a great project for trusted environments and smaller use cases. I'm unclear from the documentation how I would scale this for anything more than a single machine without heavy devops overhead and when anyone across the org. runs their own functions where isolation etc is pretty important.

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