With the new billing webhooks feature for OpenFaaS for Enterprises, you can now charge your users for their OpenFaaS usage. OpenFaaS is a developer-friendly platform for building and operating serverless functions using Kubernetes. You can run the same cloud in the cloud, or on-premises, or locally on your own machine without changes. What is chargeback? In 2017, just after I’d announced and demoed OpenFaaS to several thousand people on stage at Dockercon, I was approached by a principal developer at VMware. He asked me whether OpenFaaS supported “IT chargeback”. What’s chargeback? I asked ..read more

One of the goals of OpenFaaS is to make the developer experience simple for FaaS-style workloads simple and portable with Kubernetes. Most of the time that has meant making Kubernetes something you don’t need to think about (at least as much). But in this post, we are going to talk about how we’ve made it easier to integrate functions to Kubernetes tooling. First we’ll take a quick look at why we might want a Function CRD, even if it means “more Kubernetes”, what’s changed, how it looks, and where to go next to try it out. What’s the Function CRD good for? The experience most users will have w ..read more

We have created a new OpenFaaS template for C# and .NET 8.0 and it’s based on the Minimal API of ASP.NET Core. In the past we provided a basic csharp template that used the original forking mode of the OpenFaaS watchdog, which created one process per request, and was less efficient than newer templates where one process would handle many requests concurrently. There were also a number of unofficial templates adopted by the community, which were not necessarily kept up to date, or something that we could support directly. The new template is called: dotnet8-csharp and has the following benefits ..read more

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to install OpenFaaS Standard or OpenFaaS for Enterprises into a private, airgapped network. There are no special tools required to perform an offline installation, but you will need a computer with Internet access in order to prepare for the installation. On your private network, you should have Kubernetes already installed, but if you don’t, K3s could be a good option and has documentation for offline installations. If you don’t have a private registry in your airgap or are unsure how to set one up, CNCF Harbor is a popular open-source choice. For testing ..read more

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to transcribe audio files to text using OpenAI’s whisper model and a function written in Python. We’ll start off with GPU acceleration using an NVIDIA GPU and OpenFaaS installed on a K3s cluster. But we’ll also be showing you how you can run the same code using a CPU, which is more commonly available. Why is audio transcription useful? Common use-cases for transcribing audio could be a bot that summarises customer complaints during a Zoom call, collects negative product feedback from reviews on YouTube, or that generates a set of timestamps for YouTube video ..read more

OpenAI models can take some time to fully respond, so we’ll show you how to stream responses from functions using Server Sent Events (SSE). With the latest versions of the OpenFaaS helm charts, watchdog and python-flask template, you can now stream responses using Server Sent Events (SSE) directly from your functions. Prior to these changes, if a chat completion was going to take 10 seconds to emit several paragraphs of text, the user would have had to wait that long to see the first word. Now, the first word will be displayed as soon as it’s available from the OpenAI API. This is a great way ..read more

Learn how to take source code from users and generate custom URLs using existing building blocks. All the component parts are readily available to take user-supplied source-code, produce an OpenFaaS function, and deploy it with its own custom HTTPS URL. The target user for this kind of workflow is a SaaS company, or an internal platform team who want to offer a “code to URL” experience for their users. Learn more about multi-tenant use of OpenFaaS here: Build a Multi-Tenant Functions Platform with OpenFaaS If you follow all of the steps in this guide, then you’ll be able to take code like this ..read more

In this guide we’ll show you how to migrate functions from AWS Lambda to OpenFaaS and Kubernetes running on Akamai Cloud Computing. AWS Lambda was introduced by Amazon in 2014 and popularized the Functions As a Service (FaaS) model. OpenFaaS was introduced in 2016 and is of the most popular FaaS platforms for Kubernetes. Here’s what we hear users value in OpenFaaS over a hosted service: Portability - it can be installed on cloud or on-premises, just add Kubernetes. Developer experience - you can write functions in any language using containers, a common and portable format. And you can run th ..read more

Confluent’s hosted Kafka service is a quick and cost effective way to trigger your functions by events In this walk-through, we’ll set up a development account on Confluent Cloud for free access to an Apache Kafka cluster suitable for testing and development. We’ll then set up the Kafka Connector which is bundled with OpenFaaS Standard to trigger functions on new messages. Most of the time we see people publishing JSON, however binary and text data are also supported. So your function will receive a payload in the HTTP body, along with other metadata like the topic name, additional headers, pa ..read more

Learn how live reloading and local testing can help you iterate on functions faster with faas-cli. We’ll start by showing how testing functions on your own machine can help you iterate much more quickly than deploying each change to Kubernetes. That’s where faas-cli local-run comes in. Then, we’ll show the new --watch functionality in faas-cli up, for when it makes more sense to test and iterate within a cluster due to dependencies on other services. This is what the typical development lifecycle of an OpenFaaS function looks like: Make code changes. Publish a new container image. Deploy the ..read more