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Inovation regarding FaaS comes from BigTechs. I wish we had more OpenSource FaaS solutions, albeit OpenFaas amazing achievements still lacks more robust ecosyst

Inovation regarding FaaS comes from BigTechs. I wish we had more OpenSource FaaS solutions, albeit OpenFaas amazing achievements still lacks more robust ecosystem.

smt88 3y ago
What would the point of self-hosted FaaS be? They lose their whole value proposition when you're paying for dedicated servers or when you don't have large numbers of servers.
- willvarfar 3y ago
  FaaS could be sharing your hardware at a function level inside the JVMs or whatever you are running, rather than at the VM or hypervisor level. You can (potentially) get much better elasticity and utilisation?
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    Isn't that just functions?
    - p_l 3y ago
      Isn't FaaS just wrapping around functions and their deployment?
      - Capricorn2481 3y ago
        Yes, but I'm just confused because saying "Why isn't there an open source FaaS for on prem that shares hardware" makes no sense. At that point, you're just talking about regular coding with functions. Unless there's something I'm missing.
        p_l 3y ago
        There's a bunch of open source software that can do it for you, but it's very much "assemble this pile of blocks"
  - smt88 3y ago
    Software already shares hardware at the function level. You have far more visibility and control over this within your program than you do when you add an unnecessary layer of abstraction like FaaS. Think more about the name: Function as a Service. Why do you need to serve yourself your own functions? It makes sense only in the context of a cloud provider that's trying to solve the problem of underutilized resources used across many customers.
- oxfordmale 3y ago
  Self-hosted FaaS is only worth it if you are at the same size as Meta. If smaller companies do this, it would be a big red flag for me.
  - xylophile 3y ago
    It is literally "worth it" for companies much smaller than Meta due to the reduced infra management costs plus increased hardware utilization. A few hundred unique VMs is a boatload of work (even if you distribute it down to the dev teams), and most of those VMs will be sitting idle most of the time, just burning electricity to keep the RAM on.
    - oxfordmale 3y ago
      But you would still need a boatload of a hundred unique VMS to run your serverless functions, right? If you have a big enough SRE team to manage your serverless stack, economy of scale means that development teams utilising these can reduce their infra management costs. It is about the ratio of engineers utilising the stack compared to those that need to maintain it.
      - xylophile 3y ago
        > But you would still need a boatload of a hundred unique VMS No, you would have a boatload of generic worker VMs that could all be spun up as needed (autoscaled) from a common base image and deleted without any need to preserve state. Effectively, you're managing one VM image, which can be rolled out across your entire fleet very quickly and with zero downtime / disruption. This is even less disruption than with k8s because FAAS design is fundamentally short-lived processes, resulting in more automation (less work) for your SRE / VM team.
        oxfordmale 3y ago
        As far as I am aware there is no easy to set up open source FAAS framework. At least with Kubernetes there are a million and one tutorials, and there is a large support community.
- xylophile 3y ago
  The pendulum has swung (is swinging?) for many companies back to on-prem for cost savings. Self-hosted FAAS allows your developers to retain the abstraction over the compute platform (a step beyond what containers provide), and grants those running the physical infra significant flexibility in managing it. It's also arguably less complex than k8s for basically everyone, if your use case supports short-lived functions.
  - smt88 3y ago
    > The pendulum has swung (is swinging?) for many companies back to on-prem for cost savings. This is only true of very large companies, so it doesn't change anything about this thread, which was saying that FaaS only makes sense if you're a public cloud or a large company with many on-prem servers.
    - xylophile 3y ago
      I guess it depends on your definition of "very large". You don't need a large company to have a large tech footprint, e.g. the Internet Archive.
mike_hearn 3y ago
There is the fn project: https://fnproject.io/ https://fnproject.io/
- withinboredom 3y ago
  There's also Dapr. https://dapr.io/ https://dapr.io/
  - nerpderp82 3y ago
    There is also https://www.fluvio.io/ https://www.fluvio.io/ https://knative.dev/docs/ https://knative.dev/docs/ https://github.com/faasm/faasm https://github.com/faasm/faasm
nmhancoc 3y ago
Cloudflare open sourced workerd, there's also Apache Airflow which covers some similar use cases albeit not strictly with functions.

Inovation regarding FaaS comes from BigTechs. I wish we had more OpenSource FaaS solutions, albeit OpenFaas amazing achievements still lacks more robust ecosystem.

smt88 3y ago

What would the point of self-hosted FaaS be? They lose their whole value proposition when you're paying for dedicated servers or when you don't have large numbers of servers.

willvarfar 3y ago
FaaS could be sharing your hardware at a function level inside the JVMs or whatever you are running, rather than at the VM or hypervisor level. You can (potentially) get much better elasticity and utilisation?
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  Isn't that just functions?
  - p_l 3y ago
    Isn't FaaS just wrapping around functions and their deployment?
    - Capricorn2481 3y ago
      Yes, but I'm just confused because saying "Why isn't there an open source FaaS for on prem that shares hardware" makes no sense. At that point, you're just talking about regular coding with functions. Unless there's something I'm missing.
      - p_l 3y ago
        There's a bunch of open source software that can do it for you, but it's very much "assemble this pile of blocks"
- smt88 3y ago
  Software already shares hardware at the function level. You have far more visibility and control over this within your program than you do when you add an unnecessary layer of abstraction like FaaS. Think more about the name: Function as a Service. Why do you need to serve yourself your own functions? It makes sense only in the context of a cloud provider that's trying to solve the problem of underutilized resources used across many customers.
oxfordmale 3y ago
Self-hosted FaaS is only worth it if you are at the same size as Meta. If smaller companies do this, it would be a big red flag for me.
- xylophile 3y ago
  It is literally "worth it" for companies much smaller than Meta due to the reduced infra management costs plus increased hardware utilization. A few hundred unique VMs is a boatload of work (even if you distribute it down to the dev teams), and most of those VMs will be sitting idle most of the time, just burning electricity to keep the RAM on.
  - oxfordmale 3y ago
    But you would still need a boatload of a hundred unique VMS to run your serverless functions, right? If you have a big enough SRE team to manage your serverless stack, economy of scale means that development teams utilising these can reduce their infra management costs. It is about the ratio of engineers utilising the stack compared to those that need to maintain it.
    - xylophile 3y ago
      > But you would still need a boatload of a hundred unique VMS No, you would have a boatload of generic worker VMs that could all be spun up as needed (autoscaled) from a common base image and deleted without any need to preserve state. Effectively, you're managing one VM image, which can be rolled out across your entire fleet very quickly and with zero downtime / disruption. This is even less disruption than with k8s because FAAS design is fundamentally short-lived processes, resulting in more automation (less work) for your SRE / VM team.
      - oxfordmale 3y ago
        As far as I am aware there is no easy to set up open source FAAS framework. At least with Kubernetes there are a million and one tutorials, and there is a large support community.
xylophile 3y ago
The pendulum has swung (is swinging?) for many companies back to on-prem for cost savings. Self-hosted FAAS allows your developers to retain the abstraction over the compute platform (a step beyond what containers provide), and grants those running the physical infra significant flexibility in managing it. It's also arguably less complex than k8s for basically everyone, if your use case supports short-lived functions.
- smt88 3y ago
  > The pendulum has swung (is swinging?) for many companies back to on-prem for cost savings. This is only true of very large companies, so it doesn't change anything about this thread, which was saying that FaaS only makes sense if you're a public cloud or a large company with many on-prem servers.
  - xylophile 3y ago
    I guess it depends on your definition of "very large". You don't need a large company to have a large tech footprint, e.g. the Internet Archive.

mike_hearn 3y ago

There is the fn project: https://fnproject.io/ https://fnproject.io/

withinboredom 3y ago
There's also Dapr. https://dapr.io/ https://dapr.io/
- nerpderp82 3y ago
  There is also https://www.fluvio.io/ https://www.fluvio.io/ https://knative.dev/docs/ https://knative.dev/docs/ https://github.com/faasm/faasm https://github.com/faasm/faasm

nmhancoc 3y ago

Cloudflare open sourced workerd, there's also Apache Airflow which covers some similar use cases albeit not strictly with functions.