OpenFaaS on DigitalOcean Kubernetes

This guide is for provisioning a cluster manually, or with the new 1-Click Kubernetes Marketplace installer.

The second part of this document is what will be presented to a user, just like the page for Linkerd2.

• Sign-up as a new customer to get free credits

Listing for DigitalOcean Marketplace

OpenFaaS ® is an award-winning open source project that makes it easy for developers to deploy applications to Kubernetes in a Serverless-style. Any microservice, API, binary, or function can be packaged and deployed in a very short period of time. Once a workload is deployed via the OpenFaaS CLI, API or UI metrics will be tracked and used to auto-scale your code in response to demand.

OpenFaaS comes with built-in auto-scaling, detailed metrics and queue-processing. You can take advantage of pre-made functions from the Function, or a series of templates for Functions or Microservices covering a wide range of languages such as C#, Java, Go, Ruby, PHP, and more.

Your workloads can be accessed through the OpenFaaS gateway or triggered by a number of event sources such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis and Cron.

The project is built around open interfaces that can be extended easily. Tutorials and guides can help you enable TLS, setup custom domains, CI/CD, OAuth2, multi-user support, and many other features.

You can find out more about OpenFaaS at https://www.openfaas.com/ or take the free workshop online.

Manual provisioning of DOKS cluster via doctl

• First, get the doctl binary and run doctl auth.

  https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl

  doctl k8s cluster create \
      --region lon1 \
      --version 1.14.5-do.0 \
      --tag openfaas \
      --size s-1vcpu-2gb  \
      --count 3 \
      openfaas-cluster

  Note: you can use doctl k8s options versions to get the latest version:

Configure kubectl locally

• Point kubectl to your cluster

  In order to start using OpenFaaS, you will need to find your password and LoadBalancer IP. To do this, you will need to use kubectl and point it at your new cluster.

  doctl k8s cluster list
  
  f8d01a21-ef2a-4b93-b05f-6774e77a86e5    openfaas-cluster          lon1      1.14.5-do.0    running    openfaas-cluster-default-pool
  
  doctl k8s cluster kubeconfig save openfaas-cluster
  

  Now switch into the context of the cluster:

  kubectl config get-contexts
  *         do-lon1-openfaas-cluster         do-lon1-openfaas-cluster         do-lon1-openfaas-cluster-admin         
  
  kubectl config set-context do-lon1-openfaas-cluster
  

Manual setup of OpenFaaS (without tiller)

cd /tmp/
mkdir -p manifests

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubernetes/helm/master/scripts/get | bash
helm init --client-only

helm fetch \
  --repo https://openfaas.github.io/faas-netes/ \
  --untar \
  --untardir ./charts \
    openfaas

sed -ie s/NodePort/LoadBalancer/ ./charts/openfaas/values.yaml

export NAMESPACE="openfaas"

helm template \
  --namespace $NAMESPACE \
  --values ./charts/openfaas/values.yaml \
  --output-dir ./manifests \
    ./charts/openfaas

# Create namespaces: openfaas, openfaas-fn

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openfaas/faas-netes/master/namespaces.yml

# generate a random password
PASSWORD=$(head -c 12 /dev/urandom | shasum| cut -d' ' -f1)

kubectl -n openfaas create secret generic basic-auth \
--from-literal=basic-auth-user=admin \
--from-literal=basic-auth-password="$PASSWORD"

echo $PASSWORD > password.txt

kubectl apply -f ./manifests/openfaas/templates/

OpenFaaS for the DigitalOcean Kubernetes Marketplace (1-Click)

OpenFaaS has been deployed and is now fully-functioning. During the installation a password was created for your OpenFaaS Gateway along with a LoadBalancer to provide access to your gateway.

Configure kubectl locally

• Point kubectl to your cluster

  In order to start using OpenFaaS, you will need to find your password and LoadBalancer IP. To do this, you will need to use kubectl and point it at your new cluster.

  doctl k8s cluster list
  
  f8d01a21-ef2a-4b93-b05f-6774e77a86e5    openfaas-cluster          lon1      1.14.5-do.0    running    openfaas-cluster-default-pool
  
  doctl k8s cluster kubeconfig save openfaas-cluster
  

  Now switch into the context of the cluster:

  kubectl config get-contexts
  *         do-lon1-openfaas-cluster         do-lon1-openfaas-cluster         do-lon1-openfaas-cluster-admin         
  
  kubectl config set-context do-lon1-openfaas-cluster
  

Log into OpenFaaS

• Install the OpenFaaS CLI:

  curl -sLSf https://cli.openfaas.com | sudo sh

  Note: the CLI is also available via brew install faas-cli

• Find your LoadBalancer IP:

  You can use the LoadBalancer's IP to log into OpenFaaS, operate the CLI, and to view the UI.

  export OPENFAAS_URL=$(kubectl get svc -n openfaas gateway-external -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[*].ip}'):8080
  echo Your gateway URL is: $OPENFAAS_URL

  Note: your DigitalOcean LoadBalancer may take a few minutes to come up, so if you're not seeing an IP, try again.

• Get your password

  echo $(kubectl get secret -n openfaas basic-auth -o jsonpath="{.data.basic-auth-password}" | base64 --decode) > password.txt 
  
  echo Your admin password is: $(cat password.txt)

  • Now use the password to authenticate the CLI:

  cat password.txt | faas-cli login --username admin --password-stdin

  Note: you can use this command at any time to retrieve your password

Check that everything worked

• Deploy a function

  faas-cli store list
  
  # Find one you like
  
  faas-cli store deploy nodeinfo
  
  # List your functions
  
  faas-cli list --verbose
  
  # Check when the function is ready
  
  faas-cli describe nodeinfo
  
  Name:                nodeinfo
  Status:              Ready
  
  # Invoke the function using the URL given above, or via `faas-cli invoke`
  
  echo | faas-cli invoke nodeinfo
  echo -n "verbose" | faas-cli invoke nodeinfo

• Try the UI

  You can access the UI at the same URL of the gateway, so try this URL:

  echo http://$OPENFAAS_URL
  

  

  Demo of the inception function

Take the wheel

• Learn OpenFaaS

  Now it's over to you to start learning about Serverless with OpenFaaS and Kubernetes using the hands-on workshop.

  https://github.com/openfaas/workshop

• Add TLS for your OpenFaaS Gateway

  You can add TLS to your OpenFaaS Gateway URL with the following documentation: 1.0 SSL for the Gateway

• Join OpenFaaS Insiders

  OpenFaaS Insiders get regular email updates on project news and developments including videos, blogs, and early-access to the latest features. Join by becoming a sponsor on GitHub at any tier.

  GitHub Sponsors

• Need help?

  Visit OpenFaaS Slack