Welcome to this week's Insiders Update! Insiders gain exclusive access to early previews, tutorials, updates, news, and events on my OSS work.
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There was a debate on Twitter yesterday about how to make open-source projects sustainable. Andrew Randall of Kinvolk argued that companies that care about Open Source should downgrade their platinum foundation sponsorships and put 10-100K of that money towards independent open source projects, like OpenFaaS. Chris Aniszczyk was quick to criticise this suggestion as "donations" and stressed that projects must turn into businesses and develop products in order to fund themselves. Don't get me wrong: Chris is supportive of OpenFaaS and I think he has a point.
Which do you believe to be true? Can subscriptions like Insiders Updates provide value? Or should projects have to form corporate entities and produce closed-source add-ons in order to survive and continue to serve their community?
I think both can be possible and that's why I've recorded a short 5 minute video that covers my views.
Watch: My 5 minute video update on how I'm using my business to support OpenFaaS and its community
Some people have criticised my choice of 5 USD as a starting tier for the Insiders Updates, and they are probably right. Today there are 46 of you on that tier, and I would like to continue sending you updates. What are your thoughts on upgrading to 10 USD? Let me know.
There's three ways that you can respond directly:
- ✅ Subscribe to Insiders Updates (thank you for doing this)
- ✅ Purchase SWAG in the store, and use your discount "stay-at-home"
- ✅ If you're a commercial user then reach out to us about support and services
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- GitOps meets Serverless with OpenFaaS and Flux (Apr 29)
Learn how to apply GitOps to OpenFaaS with FluxCD from Weaveworks.
Register for the free webinar here
- SIGFriday (17th Apr) (today)
As advertised in last week's update, we're sponsoring an online happy hour, so grab a coffee or a beer and join us on OpenFaaS Zoom: Add to calendar
- NATS Connect (16th Apr)
Yesterday I spoke at the NATS Connect online conference on the value NATS brings to OpenFaaS through the PLONK stack.
I expect the recording to be up shortly and will publish the slides if enough people ask for them. There were around 135 participants when I spoke and gave a demo of asynchronous functions.
I took on a large development task to consolidate the faas-netes project with the OpenFaaS Operator. If you've not used the Operator, then you should take a look. It offers a Function CRD that can be used via kubectl apply -f in addition to faas-cli deploy
This also brings a regular ARM build of the Operator for 64-bit servers and for armhf (Raspberry Pi).
Install via arkade with the --operator flag:
arkade install openfaas --operator
If you're managing your own values.yaml file, then you need to switch to the new Docker image. The Operator image and repo has now been archived.
In this post I introduce OpenFaaS’ newest project: faasd. faasd brings the benefits of a portable Serverless experience without needing to learn and operate Kubernetes.
Read on to understand the future of Docker Swarm support in OpenFaaS and when to use faasd vs faas-netes.
Meet faasd - portable Serverless without the complexity of Kubernetes
Did you miss this blog post? It enables you to call OpenFaaS functions from any other internal system, even if running on a separate domain.
My favourite use-case is for adding functionality and dynamic data to a static-generated webpage on Netlify or GitHub Pages.
Gain access to your functions with CORS
We've had no orders of the lightweight hoodie yet, so I've had to bump up the price from the introductory price.
These really are lovely for Spring and Summer.
Forget a Zoom background, get your hoodie here.
The latest arkade apps are:
- grafana - dashboards and monitoring of your metrics. Integrates with OpenFaaS, Prometheus and InfluxDB
- jenkins - the classic CI solution - this app gets you up and running in no time. See also: Jenkins for building OpenFaaS Functions
- tekton - a CI solution built with Kubernetes CRDs
- argocd - an alternative to FluxCD, added by popular demand - deploy your functions and OpenFaaS code continuously.
What's your favourite app? Tweet to @openfaas and let us know, or request a new app
Grafana dashboards are great for getting quick feedback on critical metrics, or just for browsing interesting statistics about user behaviour on a production system.
You can now expose any private dashboard to the Internet with TLS using inlets PRO and Caddy: Expose your private Grafana dashboards with TLS
Thanks for reading, if you need a bit of social interaction, join our SIGFriday call today, or join Slack and hang out with the community.
Enjoy your weekend and see you next week!