faasd - a lightweight & portable faas engine

faasd is OpenFaaS reimagined, but without the cost and complexity of Kubernetes. It runs on a single host with very modest requirements, making it fast and easy to manage. Under the hood it uses containerd and Container Networking Interface (CNI) along with the same core OpenFaaS components from the main project.

Use-cases and tutorials

faasd is just another way to runOpenFaaS, so many things you read in the docs or in blog posts will work the same way.

Videos and overviews:

Use-cases and tutorials:

Additional resources:

The official handbook - Serverless For Everyone Else
For reference: OpenFaaS docs
For use-cases and tutorials: OpenFaaS blog
For self-paced learning: OpenFaaS workshop

About faasd

faasd is a static Golang binary
uses the same core components and ecosystem of OpenFaaS
uses containerd for its runtime and CNI for networking
is multi-arch, so works on Intel x86_64 and ARM out the box
can run almost any other stateful container through its docker-compose.yaml file

Most importantly, it's easy to manage so you can set it up and leave it alone to run your functions.

Demo of faasd running asynchronous functions

Watch the video: faasd walk-through with cloud-init and Multipass

What does faasd deploy?

faasd - itself, and its faas-provider for containerd - CRUD for functions and services, implements the OpenFaaS REST API
Prometheus - for monitoring of services, metrics, scaling and dashboards
OpenFaaS Gateway - the UI portal, CLI, and other OpenFaaS tooling can talk to this.
OpenFaaS queue-worker for NATS - run your invocations in the background without adding any code. See also: asynchronous invocations
NATS for asynchronous processing and queues

faasd relies on industry-standard tools for running containers:

You can use the standard faas-cli along with pre-packaged functions from the Function Store, or build your own using any OpenFaaS template.

When should you use faasd over OpenFaaS on Kubernetes?

To deploy microservices and functions that you can update and monitor remotely
When you don't have the bandwidth to learn or manage Kubernetes
To deploy embedded apps in IoT and edge use-cases
To distribute applications to a customer or client
You have a cost sensitive project - run faasd on a 1GB VM for 5-10 USD / mo or on your Raspberry Pi
When you just need a few functions or microservices, without the cost of a cluster

faasd does not create the same maintenance burden you'll find with maintaining, upgrading, and securing a Kubernetes cluster. You can deploy it and walk away, in the worst case, just deploy a new VM and deploy your functions again.

Learning faasd

The faasd project is MIT licensed and open source, and you will find some documentation, blog posts and videos for free.

However, "Serverless For Everyone Else" is the official handbook and was written to contribute funds towards the upkeep and maintenance of the project.

The official handbook and docs for faasd

You'll learn how to deploy code in any language, lift and shift Dockerfiles, run requests in queues, write background jobs and to integrate with databases. faasd packages the same code as OpenFaaS, so you get built-in metrics for your HTTP endpoints, a user-friendly CLI, pre-packaged functions and templates from the store and a UI.

Topics include:

Should you deploy to a VPS or Raspberry Pi?
Deploying your server with bash, cloud-init or terraform
Using a private container registry
Finding functions in the store
Building your first function with Node.js
Using environment variables for configuration
Using secrets from functions, and enabling authentication tokens
Customising templates
Monitoring your functions with Grafana and Prometheus
Scheduling invocations and background jobs
Tuning timeouts, parallelism, running tasks in the background
Adding TLS to faasd and custom domains for functions
Self-hosting on your Raspberry Pi
Adding a database for storage with InfluxDB and Postgresql
Troubleshooting and logs
CI/CD with GitHub Actions and multi-arch
Taking things further, community and case-studies

View sample pages, reviews and testimonials on Gumroad:

"Serverless For Everyone Else"

Deploy faasd

The easiest way to deploy faasd is with cloud-init, we give several examples below, and post IaaS platforms will accept "user-data" pasted into their UI, or via their API.

For trying it out on MacOS or Windows, we recommend using multipass to run faasd in a VM.

If you don't use cloud-init, or have already created your Linux server you can use the installation script as per below:

git clone https://github.com/openfaas/faasd --depth=1
cd faasd

./hack/install.sh

This approach also works for Raspberry Pi

It's recommended that you do not install Docker on the same host as faasd, since 1) they may both use different versions of containerd and 2) docker's networking rules can disrupt faasd's networking. When using faasd - make your faasd server a faasd server, and build container image on your laptop or in a CI pipeline.

Deployment tutorials

Terraform scripts:

Function and template store

For community functions see faas-cli store --help

For templates built by the community see: faas-cli template store list, you can also use the dockerfile template if you just want to migrate an existing service without the benefits of using a template.

Community support

Commercial users and solo business owners should become OpenFaaS GitHub Sponsors to receive regular email updates on changes, tutorials and new features.

If you are learning faasd, or want to share your use-case, you can join the OpenFaaS Slack community.

Backlog, features and known issues

For completed features, WIP and upcoming roadmap see:

See ROADMAP.md

Are you looking to hack on faasd? Follow the developer instructions for a manual installation, or use the hack/install.sh script and pick up from there.

jrcichra/faasd