7,439 karma · joined March 31, 2016
> To make it more interesting, it'll be a contest with milestones that you can reach by completing different tasks and sharing the results with the community. There's no such thing as perfect here, and putting your own spin on the project is encouraged.
> The goals of the project are to bring the excitement of watching nature at work, directly in your own kitchen window sill and to give you a practical project, to get started with IoT and embedded electronics.
This tech stack looks over-engineered upon first glance, but I don't know much about the author or his product.
I use Kubernetes a fair bit whilst developing OpenFaaS and teaching people about K3s, but there is a whole world of development teams who aren't prepared to consider it as an option. One of the reasons we created "faasd" [2] (single-node OpenFaaS) was to help people who just wanted to run some code, but didn't want to take "Kubernetes mastery 101"
For a small app using a managed service like Cloud Run plus some cloud storage should get you very far. I saw that Heroku is still popular with the indie community, with the author of Bannerbear getting a lot of value from the managed platform.
[1] https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/ [2] https://github.com/openfaas/faasd
This is a cheap and easy project to set up and very satisfying. Try it out with some green beans, peas or a herb?
I always get overwhelmed by how much it can do, so focus on a few useful features.
Definitely prefer it to "screen"
https://inlets.dev/blog/2021/02/11/secure-letsencrypt-tunnel...
The idea of inlets is to set up a self-hosted tunnel which has no rate limits, port, domain or usage restrictions. Competing with a managed service (SaaS) tunnel means needing to automate the developer experience.
If you use inlets or have heard of it (there's ~ 8k GitHub stars now), let me know how you get on with the new feature.
The new version includes a PDF, scripts and a community Slack channel as part of the package.
You'll: setup your server with NFS and TFTP, configure filesystems for each of the RPis, get them booting up, measure the speed, then setup K3s in a HA configuration. From there you can learn what to deploy on the cluster, and find a few jump off points for going further.
Hope you enjoy it, and if you're a k3sup.dev user, thank you for the support!
This blog post is not a thought piece, it's something for people to play with, it's the whole point of the post - a practical set of steps to literally fork and deploy a custom version of openfaas.
To me flagging just seems a bit off, like it should be for inappropriate or lewd content. The way HN works, if content is not a good fit, people don't upvote, and it doesn't get seen.
Absolutely beyond me why someone flagged this post when submitted yesterday.
Here's a separate thread for "Docker Series B: More Fuel To Help Dev Teams Get Ship Done" - with a bit more info on what the plan is from Scott.
Interesting to see this news on the same day that "We don't need Docker" was also on the front page of Hacker News. I think we absolutely still need Docker in 2021.
With regards to VAT - when you sell to B2C customers in Europe (which I'm sure you do), you need to charge them VAT in the state they reside in. The easiest way to do this is with something like Paddle [0]. After that, probably registering in Ireland for VAT MOSS [1].
It alarms me how many people start taking payments from Stripe for their new platform without spending any time to get sales/VAT tax compliance in place.
Remember when this [2] blew up on the front page of Hacker News about GitHub Sponsors delivering a B2C service, without any VAT applied? That's the same reason that just taking payments with Stripe isn't enough.
[0] https://paddle.com/support/how-does-paddle-handle-vat-on-my-... [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vat-moss-vat-on-sa... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293050
It's how I learned that telnet isn't encrypted many years ago :)
The use-case could be ingestion of IoT sensor data from edge devices. I put this example together to show people a starting point, that could be modified and extended for your own use.
After the intro, we talk a bit about Go features like testing and newer features like generics, before going into a bit of a deep dive coding session, building up functions from scratch in Golang.
The functions built with OpenFaaS are actually containers with a HTTP server inside, so they can be deployed to Kubernetes, Cloud Run or Knative in a similar way. They would probably also work with fly (but I haven't tried that yet)
The "workload" definition is HTTP on port 8080 and a health check (configurable) https://docs.openfaas.com/reference/workloads/
For folks starting out with FaaS and not ready to go full-on K8s, faasd might be a good option to explore - https://github.com/openfaas/faasd - it has containerd and CNI (just like K8s) but no clustering so it's faster and has a sub-second cold-start.
Seems like I can keep Linux and build a 5800X, and have > 32GB RAM to boot.
For those happy with MacOS as a daily drive, the Mac Mini is incredible value vs a full PC build.
https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1362710626385207297?s...
Thanks again for all the messages on Twitter - and to GitHub for this token.
You can find out more about my journey through the interview or blog post on my GitHub profile - or get weekly emails through GitHub Sponsors (another thing I appreciate about GitHub) - https://github.com/alexellis/
https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis/ https://github.com/sponsors/openfaas/
The "Treasure Trove Portal" has discounts, and updates since 2019 now, as a user of openfaas or any of my software, there's definitely value here that shouldn't be passed up.
The weekly features are not about my OSS projects, but about the industry, marketing, business and Open Source - so that there's something for everyone.
The comment about companies not using open source is not really valid, them not valuing the time of maintainers would be more accurate.
And the flat version - https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1362369733052551168?s...
This is more money than corporate users have paid in sponsorships in 4 years to the OpenFaaS project, which says something about the current state of funding.
It's not going to solve the funding problems of open source, but I decided to try something else and it had better than expected results.
This post covers: social sharing, meta tags, channels, books you could buy and benefit from, examples from the community, how to generate social sharing images, and much more from my experience.
It seems like a good time to mention my blog post from last year "Then he asked me “Is Kubernetes right for us?" -> https://alexellisuk.medium.com/then-he-asked-me-is-kubernete...
Some of the feedback I've had so far is that it was refreshing to get "permission" to consider alternatives vs. the current hype. I use K8s and K3s quite broadly myself, but increasingly see consulting prospects and customers who are not comfortable to make the leap, but are very happy on managed services with their chosen vendor - Azure / AWS / GCP.
GitLab recently released a bunch of terraform to show you how to run side projects in the free tier of a cloud - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/5-minute-production-app/deploy...
The OpenFaaS project again is very coupled to Kubernetes, making it easier to use and more reliable is important to the community and project's future. However, we created a version called faasd that works more like docker-compose. It's received much more traction than we expected and companies and individuals are putting it into production. It does't have clustering, and supports only 1 replica per function, so it's surprising. https://github.com/openfaas/faasd
I'll keep doing my bit to promote solutions that make K8s easier to understand like K3s (see also https://k3sup.dev) and to look into alternatives. But as you will see in my blog post - I don't think it's right to assume Kubernetes is the right solution for every team, and every project, without first talking about the problem being solved.
This is what I learnt writing and publishing an eBook - something that I had heard could earn me money to support my open source contributions and software.
Hope you get something out of this - and note the blog post is not for people who would buy the book, but people who are curious about going independent or building wealth.
I'm now approaching 10k USD, at that point I'll do a second write-up on the technical how-to and long-tail vs initial launch marketing.
https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1359061133093720065?s...
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...
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.