Welcome to this week's Insiders Update! Insiders gain exclusive access to early previews, updates, news, and events on my OSS work.
✅ Join the community on the Insiders Track 👉 through GitHub Sponsors. Just pay whatever you want.
We've had a couple of new updates on the OpenFaaS.com website including interactive code examples, check them out at openfaas.com. A thank you goes out to Alistair Hey for turning out this feature whilst on his skiing holiday, #TeamServerless.
I'm also excited to say that we've almost hit 21k GitHub stars since moving two projects (faasd and openfaas-operator) into the main OpenFaaS org!
Over the last few weeks we've lost 5 bronze sponsors and a number of individual backers which has made things harder for me, so I want to say a big thank you to Rancher Labs for renewing their homepage sponsorship at openfaas.com.
If you're using OpenFaaS at work internally or commercially, take a moment with your manager to discuss what would happen if I couldn't afford to keep working full-time on the project? How would that affect your product and customers?
What you can do as an organisation to help? I'm very keen to hear your ideas and suggestions. My calendar is open, so feel free to book a call.
In late 2019, I wrote an essay on The Pressures of Leadership in OSS, I would recommend reading this to get a clear perspective of what it's like to be a maintainer.
Folks, thank you for believing in Open Source and community. This isn't an easy journey, but your support makes a difference in a way you can't imagine.
OpenFaaS - faasd, support, and homepage updates
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Join us on Slack
We'd love to see you on Slack - come and chat about inlets, OpenFaaS, k3sup, Kubernetes, ARM, OSS, whatever you like. Don't miss out!
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On our members call this week we discussed the project roadmap which is available on Trello.
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faasd becomes an official OpenFaaS project
I opened Issue 36 and shared the suggestion on Slack, the community were supportive, and now faasd has been moved into the main organisation.
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Build a Serverless appliance with faasd
faasd works well for the same kinds of use-cases as OpenFaaS on Kubernetes, but is much simpler to manage. You can think of it like "faas in a box" or "faas to go".
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The support page has been updated to clearly show that: Users can buy an Insiders Subscription through GitHub Sponsors, a homepage sponsorship to partner with the project, or professional services and support from OpenFaaS Ltd.
What do you think?
Commercial users of OpenFaaS can benefit from a support relationship to get backlog, feature, issue and PR prioritization. 1:1 support via email and Zoom is also available so that you can sleep well at night and keep up to date with all the latest security patches and updates.
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OpenFaaS/inlets/ingress Operators all refreshed for Kubernetes 1.17
All of the operators have been updated to use Golang 1.13, go modules and the latest Kubernetes 1.17 API. Please update soon and let me know if you have any feedback.
As part of this change, the OpenFaaS CRD was released as v1 and the OpenFaaS Operator, graduated into the OpenFaaS GitHub org along with faasd.
apiVersion: openfaas.com/v1 kind: Function metadata: name: nodeinfo namespace: openfaas-fn spec: name: nodeinfo image: functions/nodeinfo:latest
Using a CRD you can run
kubectl apply -f nodeinfo.yamlfor instance.The easiest way to update your openfaas-operator, ingress-operator, or inlets-operator is to use
k3sup app install.
The following templates have been consolidated:
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python3-debian moved to the official templates repo - use this template for data-science or any code that needs to compile native C modules such as TensorFlow or Numpy.
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node10-express-service moved into the node10-express repo
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The bash-streaming-template is now part of the template store and featured as a sample on openfaas.com
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All afterburn templates have been archived in the openfaas-incubator organisation, if you were using these, please see the equivalent HTTP template.
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The node12 template has now been extended to support RAW body parsing for use-cases like verifying Stripe webhooks. The second essential change was to allow users to set a custom limit for JSON bodies. Find out more in the template docs
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Go modules for
goandgolang-middleware/http- all three official Go templates have been modified to work with Go modules and Go 1.13, submodules are also supported.
Furthermore, many experimental projects have been archived so show that they are no longer active or being worked on, this mainly affects the incubator -> https://github.com/openfaas-incubator
Simply run faas-cli template store list/pull to work with one of the templates above
Derek gains detailed release notes
Our OSS GitHub bot, Derek is used by OpenFaaS, Docker, inlets and goreleaser. He's just gained a new feature as part of the release_notes feature which can now print out a list of commits which made it into each release.
There's open issues too, where contributions are more than welcome and easy to get started with. If you're experienced with Go, let me know in #derek on Slack?
Star / fork Derek on GitHub, or install on your own project
The best place for contributing or technical support is Slack, so join the #inlets channel and say hi.
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New tutorial - Share work with clients using inlets
Sharing work with clients, colleagues and team-members can be challenging for freelancers, for those who are travelling away from home, and for developers within a corporate network. I want to show you a quick way to get a free Cloud Native tunnel with inlets so that you can share work with clients and colleagues within seconds.
Driven by customer-demand there's several new updates for inlets-pro, the cloud native tunnel for TCP traffic.
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This reference guide details all the flags for inlets-pro client and server, along with common problems you may run into and configurations for Kubernetes.
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Multiple inlets-pro servers on the same machine
Some users have requested to run multiple copies of the inlets-pro server on the same machine, that's now possible with 0.5.3 which introduces a new flag to prevent your automatic TLS certificates from overwriting each other or clashing.
Update with
sudo inletsctl download --proand seeinlets-pro server --helpfor more. -
Through the use of a separate public port for your control-plane, and a private port for the data-plane, inlets-pro can allow you to punch out services into a public cluster, but keep them internal.
The use-case I gave was an on-premises PostgreSQL server, which you want to access within a Kubernetes cluster running on public cloud, for instance, client data or legacy records.
Start your trial of inlets-pro today
k3sup is now 7 months old and doing really well. I keep seeing the repo showing up in the Golang GitHub trending page and star notifications popping up in the #webhook channel on OpenFaaS Slack. I started the project originally to help IT and developers set up Kubernetes cluster with k3s, but as you may know, it now has a whole apps ecosystem behind it.
k3sup apps can take you from an empty VM, or AWS EKS cluster, to a production-grade OpenFaaS environment with a TLS certificate from LetsEncrypt, all in about 5 minutes.
I am also excited to share that we've now collected around 2-dozen community blog posts and projects about k3sup.
Get started, and read one of the many tutorials in the repo:
Have a great weekend, and if you missed it and like a good read, checkout my write-up about my Linux developer machine, and my development workflow: Building a Linux Desktop for Cloud Native Development