I discovered FaaS and what it changed for me

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14 points·feross··6 comments

Funny, i toyed with it a since some time and think about abandoning it. They just removed the most interesting feature which is scale to zero from the open source version.

OpenFaaS has a rest API, so no that's not accurate - you can scale to zero and back again.

You may have been "toying" - many people do, but here's some examples of end users https://www.github.com/openfaas/faas/tree/master/ADOPTERS.md

faasd uses pausing of containers so there's barely a noticeable cold start unlike with Kubernetes where it can take a couple of seconds.

Up until 2018 everyone just used a min scale of 1, and was very happy because it meant never having to bear a Kubernetes Pod being scheduled. This is one of the reasons that faasd is quicker - no distributed state to manage.

Feel free to ask for help on Slack if you are unclear about scaling. I'm sure the community would be happy to help.

Would love to use this to run user generated code in our workflow engine. It would be heavily sandboxed.

I like cloudflare’s isolate based implementation even more. Wish OpenFaas had that as an option.

Funny you say that because I was talking to an openfaas customer who was using V8 isolates and is moving away from that because have their own issues with mutability.

They are likely going to use kata containers - which can be configured on either Kubernetes or faasd.

The alternative which I've not tried yet is firecracker-containerd

https://katacontainers.io https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker-container...

FaasD looks cool, but building with serverless framework also seriously simplifies developing for aws lambda or other cloud providers. Highly recommend it

Running my own machine where I deploy my own cloud functions sounds exactly writing an API server. What an I missing here?

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