Welcome to this week's Insiders Update, Insiders are those who are sponsoring me on GitHub, backing me on Patreon, or companies sponsoring openfaas.com. This starts from 5 USD / mo for exclusive access to updates, news and new content. https://github.com/users/alexellis/sponsorship
Today's Insiders Update is brought to you from the Peak District of Derbyshire in the UK. The Peaks are home to Chatsworth House, Dovedale, Mam Tor, dismantled railways, and the Bakewell pudding. I would highly recommend a walking holiday in this area.
There is a built-in (soft) limit of 110 Pods per node in Kubernetes. So if you have 2x 64-core nodes, you cannot schedule more than 220 Pods successfully.
Read up on how to change it: Kubernetes Pod limit
Civo are building a managed k3s service for development. Check it out and let them know what you want to see: https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1150824469797228546
Nigel is an excellent course author and very well known on Pluralsight.com. Sign up for this free content:
Getting Started with Kubernetes
There are several Kubernetes APIs which are moving from one place to another. I found the messaging in the blog post a little confusing, but what it means is that you need to edit all of your YAML files for the following:
- NetworkPolicy
- PodSecurityPolicy
- DaemonSet, Deployment, StatefulSet, and ReplicaSet
- Ingress
If you automate Kubernetes, or have built a platform upon it (i.e. OpenFaaS, or your CI/CD pipeline at work) then there may be some significant overhaul for you. The good news it that it's relatively straight-forward:
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: markdownrender
spec:
replicas: 1
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: markdownrender
spec:
containers:
- name: markdownrender
image: functions/markdownrender:latest-armhf
imagePullPolicy: Always
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
protocol: TCPBecomes:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: markdownrender
spec:
replicas: 1
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: markdownrender
spec:
containers:
- name: markdownrender
image: functions/markdownrender:latest-armhf
imagePullPolicy: Always
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
protocol: TCPFor a complete list, see: this blog post
If you encounter any issues with OpenFaaS, then please let me know on Slack, or raise an issue on GitHub.
Grab one of the fan-shims to make sure your RPi4 doesn't throttle due to temperatures soaring over 80C
k3s is now my recommended Kubernetes distribution for RPi
Are you tired of hearing about Service Mesh? Linkerd2 is a light-weight mesh that uses minimal resources, introduces very little latency and serves a useful purpose.
Here's a tutorial I wrote with Matias Pan from the OpenFaaS GitHub members group:
- mTLS - e2e encryption between Pods / services / functions
- detailed latency and metrics - find out how your code is actually performing
- more balanced proxying on HTTP/1.1 (when Keep-Alive is used) and HTTP/2
The 2.4 release adds traffic-shifting which I'm very excited about. Traffic-shifting enables canary and blue/green deployments of functions. You can send 10% of traffic to the new version and 90% to the old version and gradually switch it over.
Here's a photo of community member Keiran Smith demoing my example, live at Cloud Native Edinburgh!
View the tweet and grab his slides here
The community needs your input with these issues:
Is this something you would like to see?
Vivek Singh has written up the first blog post on how to use logs in OpenFaaS with faas-cli or the REST API.
Track the progress for other providers here: Suggestion: surface logs in REST API
I'm seeing more and more traction of OpenFaaS Cloud which is really encouraging. There are two ways you can try OpenFaaS Cloud.
You'll get:
💬 Automatic CI/CD with public/private @github 💬 Free endpoints with TLS 💬 Custom subdomains 💬 Dozens of languages supported
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Apply for access to the Community Cluster which is hosted by OpenFaaS Ltd
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Host your own in 100 seconds with ofc-bootstrap
We've had an interest in the community from half a dozen developers both at IBM and within the broader community that want to see OpenFaaS come to the Power platform.
Power Systems is a family of server computers from IBM that are based on its POWER processors.
Supporting other platforms and architectures is something that we're used to. You may have seen one of my many blog posts on Raspberry Pi Clusters.
If you have an interest in this work, then please comment on the issue: Proposal: Add ppc64le support
Anyone can submit a function to the OpenFaaS Function Store.
Endre sent in his new function which traces photos to produce line-drawings. He's packaged it as a function for everyone to use:
Why don't you try it out with your own photos at tweet to @openfaas?
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jaas - create ad-hoc / one-shot jobs for Docker Swarm. This is a tool for DevOps engineers who have to run regular jobs to clean up state, re-index databases, send emails, and a plethora of other tasks.
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inlets - I tweeted asking for help to get inlets over the the line to 3k stars, it ended up on the front page of Hacker News and "Show HN" the day after. It's now broken through 4k and has had a surge in downloads and
git clones. Awesome! Check it out for when you want to tunnel between networks - whether internal-internal or external-external or some combination of the two. Think "ngrok, but free and Open Source" -
hash-browns - Generate SHA256 hashes in Go with Prometheus metrics - use this example to learn more about Prometheus and how to instrument your cloud native applications
Despite my being away for a week, the community has been as busy as ever. If you would like to see something feature in next week's update, please send it across to me on Slack.
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Need help with Cloud Native / Developer-experience or OpenFaaS? Book a drop-in session with me via https://calendly.com/alexellis
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