Ever got curious about OpenFaaS, the open alternative to Cloud Run? So was I! The problem is: You will want some kind of cluster or VM to actually run your functions-as-a-service. Just so happens that (ironically) you can use Cloud Run to run OpenFaaS without setting any of those heavier bits up. While this specific use-case can seem convoluted—you'd probably want OpenFaaS to actually get out of the big clouds—this is at least a concise, short, minimal way of understanding how OpenFaaS works.
The approach here is to handle bundling and building on your machine, and then sending off a complete image for Cloud Run to deploy.
- You have access to Google Cloud Platform
- You have sufficient privileges to push images to GCP and run them on Cloud Run
- You have enabled APIs for at least Cloud Run (possibly also Container/Artifact Registry)
- You have
gcloudinstalled - You have
faas-cliinstalled - You have Docker installed
- You have checked and set variables in
deploy.sh
The application definition is done in stack.yml.
The actual function handler is in src/handler.js. Refer to https://docs.openfaas.com/cli/templates/#nodejs-12-node12-of-watchdog-template for how these Node 12 functions work.
Run sh deploy.sh (FYI it's Mac-oriented) to shrinkwrap the application with faas-cli, build it locally, push it to GCP, and then deploy it.