Introduction to OpenFaaS

In the previous chapter, we learned about OpenWhisk, an open source serverless framework, which is part of the Apache Software Foundation. We learned how to create, list, invoke, update, and delete OpenWhisk actions. We also discussed how to automate the action invocation with feeds, triggers, and rules.

In this chapter, we will be studying OpenFaas, another open source framework used to build and deploy serverless functions on top of containers. This was started as a proof-of-concept project by Alex Ellis in October 2016, and the first version of the framework, written in Golang, was committed to GitHub in December 2016.

OpenFaaS was originally designed to work with Docker Swarm, which is the clustering and scheduling tool for Docker containers. Later, the OpenFaaS framework was rearchitected to support the Kubernetes framework, too.

OpenFaaS comes with a built-in UI named OpenFaaS Portal, which can be used to create and invoke the functions from...