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Comment by masukomi | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me WHERE the servers exist for this "serverless" platform? Is this code i run on lamda and lamda competitors? Is apache hosting it? Do i have to set up my own servers to run the code?

All the intro docs and FAQs seem to assume that "serverless" is literally no servers, just magical cloud fairies or something.

I get that it uses docker containers, but where can i / am i expected to run those?

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This is open source, so "someone" has to run it.

This someone could be e.g. IBM or RedHat, it could also be someone like Adobe that wants to offer a FaaS integrated into their main product.

It could also be your own company, e.g. you could have an infrastructure team that provides it for all other teams.

I find mentions of “deployments”, but unlike a platform like Kubernetes I can’t seem to find any mention of how to set up the “serverless servers” anywhere. And until then it’s just a really neat local CLI

yeah that was my take too. I have zero clue what's involved with the hosting of this and as it's an open source serverless product that's the most important bit. How easy or hard it is to use is irrelevant if i don't know _where_ to point things or what to do to make there be something to point things at.

It looks like OpenWhisk right now deploys onto JVM application servers you provision yourself, using runc+Docker and Akka clustering under the hood to orchestrate everything. I think they have plans to target Kubernetes as well. FaaS/"serverless" (a terrible name) is just a layer over an orchestration/deployment system (like Kube) that spins up instances in response to triggers / events and handles routing and scheduling of the instances in a way that's supposed to be transparent to the end-user. https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk/blob/master/do...

Think of it as of some sort of a cluster.

On a single machine, you can run processes ("invoke functions") locally. On a cluster, you can run a process, and it will start somewhere, on one of the less-loaded boxes.

With "serverless", the cluster is the cloud (a datacenter). You do not have to maintain it, but you can specify the code to run, and it will run, as many copies of it simultaneously as needed (thousands or zero), and you are only billed for the resources you consumed. It's ultimate elasticity for non-interactive load.

I appreciate the explanation, but you misunderstand me.

I get "serverless". I totally get lambda and some of the other open source clones of it. What i don't get about "Whisk" is if this is something that builds on top of existing serverless infrastructure that makes it better, or if it's it's own serverless infrastructure that you have to install on your own servers, or ... what. they're completely opaque about the actual server side infrastructure of this "serverless" platform.

It's essentially 'set up your own servers and run a lambda-like service yourself.'

Here's some documentation for OpenWhisk on Kubernetes (running locally or on your own servers or cloud providers' Kubernetes cluster meeting the requirements specified). https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk-deploy-kube/bl...

There are other ways OpenWhisk could be deployed besides as well (see https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk/blob/master/an... ), but it appears you will need server(s) or local computer to run OpenWhisk on.

I do completely agree the Apache site for the project seems lacking in terms of the deployment docs. Which is a shame, because as you can see from the links I posted, deployment can be quite involved. It is still incubating though. Maybe they need volunteers to step up and help with the documentation on the Apache site?

This is all just from what I could find in docs/searching for info, I've never run OpenWhisk.

I get the impression that Apache are running the servers themselves, but it’s not clear from skimming the documentation.

Edit: I could be wrong, looks like there is an OpenWhisk offering from IBM: https://console.bluemix.net/openwhisk/

The main page is incredibly ambiguous and confusing. Full of market speak and totally unclear.

The goal of the project is to give an Operations Team the ability to not have to manage the platform and software stacks being utilized and to give developers the luxury of not worrying on how to scale their application so long as they follow some basic constraints.

It's actually serverless for the user. You run a server but the user of your service (apache openwhisk) only needs to define code and triggers on your service, that runs on your servers.

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