OpenWhisk can be started using Docker Compose locally with a single command (make quickstart) using this repo: https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk-devtools/tree/...

It can also be deployed on k8s with minimal effort: https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk-deploy-kube

There's also instructions for using VMs as the infrastructure layer: https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk#quick-start

If you have any issues open an issue or join us on the slack (http://openwhisk.incubator.apache.org/slack.html).

(I'm a committer on the project).