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Insiders' Update: 4th December 2021 - I wish I'd published sooner, walking away from millions of dollars and Insiders' Corner
This week I wish I'd published sooner and share your articles that you've submitted to me as sponsors.
To wrap up I'll leave you with my Gophercon Keynote on the OpenFaaS journey over the past 60 months including when I was offered several million pounds to sell control of the project. Do you think that I made the right decision for the community? Listen in to find out.
The evolution of the cover of Serverless For Everyone Else. The first one I designed with Canva.com, the second was by Iheb who also designed the inlets logo.
January will mark 12 months since I published and sold my first eBook on Gumroad. Within 27 days I earned 10k USD, which is close to what the OpenFaaS GitHub Sponsors account receives in an entire year. Whilst you cannot quit your job on that amount of money, I wish I had experimented with charging for the value I create even earlier.
It seems that many people believe that self-publishing is difficult, time-consuming and that the rewards are poor. I share my experiences and tackle some of those misconceptions. As a bonus, the article trended on the front page of Hacker News and received 80+ comments. Sadly, it seems that readers of the orange site are quite tight, and it didn't lead to a bump in sales.
By the way, it's also not just about eBooks. I cover other things you can monetise, so if you are interested in passive revenue, then read the article: I wish I'd self-published sooner
I worked on a patch for the OpenFaaS so that Pro users can authenticate with the CLI using the Code authorization flow and the PKCE extension. This replaces the older implicit flow which is now considered insecure.
Did you know that you can deploy to OpenFaaS without sharing passwords? It works through setting up OpenFaaS to federate with GitHub Actions. What's the use-case?
- Share an environment with colleagues or friends without sharing your admin password
- Deploy to any OpenFaaS cluster without any need for managing passwords
- Operate OpenFaaS as a SaaS/service without needing passwords from your users
See how it works: Deploy without credentials with GitHub Actions and OIDC
Send me an email if you'd like to try either SSO or the new GitHub Actions federation.
This section of my update is for content provided by you.
Having seen Ivan's work on low-level containers, and having helped him promote it, I asked him to write a short article about the way faasd leverages containerd. What Ivan came up with was very different, but still has his unique deeply technical style.
Since this is self-researched, take some of the things he says with a pinch of salt. I've provided some notes for him, but thought it was too good not to share with you today.
One of Lucas Roesler's favourite topics is tracing, so I asked him to explore what it would take to enable tracing within OpenFaaS. He didn't disappoint.
Lucas' tweet showing OpenTelemetry and OpenFaaS tracing a Python function
See his WIP repo: LucasRoesler/openfaas-tracing-walkthrough
- Making a Docker Dev Environment for OpenFaaS by Felipe Cruz - "Docker Dev Environments" are a new product from Docker. Felipe shows you how they work with an example using OpenFaaS.
- Example: faasd for Lima by Johan Siebens - Lima is similar to multipass and can be used to run VMs on Linux and Macs, Johan contributed an example for faasd
- CICD Patterns with GitHub Actions and Docker by Peter Solymos
Every once in a while someone comes into your life who makes a lasting impression. For OpenFaaS, there’ve now been 350 of those people, from all around the world each with individual stories and achievements to share. They all had a common interest: they wrote Go and believed that functions should be easy to use and portable. This is their story 5 years after it started.
Alex shares why he started the project, the highs and lows along the way from quitting his job, to going toe-to-toe with corporate giants. He’ll tell the story through the contributors, and community that helped build and shape the project which now has 28k GitHub Stars and dozens of end-user companies in production.
Send me an email by replying to this message:
- I mention how one person 3x'd his salary to over 180,000 USD / annum through his experience with openfaas. Does that appeal to you?
- OpenFaaS now only earns less than 12,000 USD / year via Github Sponsors, so do you think I made the right decision for the community?
- Have you contributed to or used OpenFaaS? What was your earliest memory of the project?
Enjoy the video and have a great week ahead.
Alex