[Sandbox] SlimFaas

[guillaume-chervet]

Application contact emails

guillaume.chervet@axa.fr,guilllaume.chervet@gmail.com,antoine.blancke@axa.fr,guillaume.delahaye@axa.fr,lilian.delouvy@axa.fr

@g7ed6e @lilian-delouvy @antoineblancke @guillaume-chervet

Project Summary

The slimest and simplest Function As A Service

Project Description

SlimFaas act as a very small proxy to add into your Kubernetes namespace, it provide :

• Scale to 0 after a period of inactivity (work with deployment and statefulset)
• Scale up/out (comming soon)
• Synchronous HTTP calls
• Asynchronous HTTP calls
  • Allows you to limit the number of parallel HTTP requests for each underlying function
• Synchronous Publish event via HTTP calls (events) to every replicas which deployment subscribe to the event name
• Retry: 3 times with graduation: 2 seconds, 4 seconds, 8 seconds
• Private and Public functions
  • Private functions can be accessed only by internal namespace http call from pods
• Mind Changer: REST API that show the status of your functions and allow to wake up your infrastructure
  • Very useful to inform end users that your infrastructure is starting
• Plug and Play: just deploy a standard pod
  • No impact on your current kubernetes manifests: just add an annotation to the pod you want to auto-scale
• Very Slim and very Fast

Org repo URL (provide if all repos under the org are in scope of the application)

https://github.com/AxaFrance

Project repo URL in scope of application

https://github.com/AxaFrance/SlimFaas

Additional repos in scope of the application

No response

Website URL

https://github.com/AxaFrance/SlimFaas

Roadmap

https://github.com/AxaFrance/SlimFaas/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+Feature

Roadmap context

• Aggregate functions swagger
• Web Interface from swagger
• Async call Scale up/out
• Sync call Scale up/out

Contributing Guide

https://github.com/AxaFrance/SlimFaas/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

Code of Conduct (CoC)

https://github.com/AxaFrance/SlimFaas/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Adopters

No response

Contributing or Sponsoring Org

AXA

Maintainers file

https://github.com/AxaFrance/SlimFaas/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md

IP Policy

• If the project is accepted, I agree the project will follow the CNCF IP Policy

Trademark and accounts

• If the project is accepted, I agree to donate all project trademarks and accounts to the CNCF

Why CNCF?

Being part of the CNCF will help SlimFaas gain visibility, more feedback, support and consumers. We built it in response to a series of needs.

Benefit to the Landscape

Our history:

6 years ago, we chose OpenFaas for our data science production project (in test and learn mode). It worked pretty well. Over time, we learned that OpenFaas was not compatible with our way of building and deploying projects (1 namespace per project). The configuration was too complex and tightly coupled with OpenFaas. We had to deploy one OpenFaas instance per project. Monitoring was not compatible with our internal system, and the license was too expensive. We tried to switch to Knative, but it was not compatible with our internal security and Kubernetes management methods. So we started building a proxy to replace OpenFaas without making any breaking changes in our application. This proxy was designed to work with Keda for scaling up and down. However, we realized that it was very easy to scale up/down directly from this small proxy without any dependencies. SlimFaas was born. It is a very simple Function as a Service, very light and simple to install and use within your namespace whithout any magic and the most important : with no coupling. We saved a lot of time and money!

Cloud Native 'Fit'

It is a proxy, but it aim to bring better scale up/down (scale to 0).
It is a kind of a Function As A Service but whithout the magic behind. It aim to be really plug and play with few annotations to add to your kube configuration.

Cloud Native 'Integration'

N/A

Cloud Native Overlap

N/A

Similar projects

The most similar project is OpenFaas.
Also Keda and knative would be some alternatives.

Landscape

No

Business Product or Service to Project separation

N/A

Project presentations

https://github.com/AxaFrance/SlimFaas

Videos

• French : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvd6FCuCZPI
• English: https://youtu.be/hxRfvJhWW1w?si=4LuPgHVsuEVhlhpF

Project champions

May be @scraly in the future if she is interrested by the project.

Additional information

No response

[rochaporto]

One thing to consider is the project currently has a MIT License.

https://github.com/brexhq/substation/blob/main/LICENSE
https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/charter.md#11-ip-policy

@guillaume-chervet thanks for the info on the project, was it also presented to TAG-Runtime?

[rochaporto]

@guillaume-chervet can you expand on:

• the seen Knative limitations for your internal security and kubernetes management methods
• the limitations of OpenFaaS
• the mechanisms for end users to manage the scale up/down functions, maybe a link to relevant docs?

This should help better scope the project in the ecosystem.

[edrob999]

TAG Contributor Strategy has reviewed this project and found the following:

• Contributor guide is incomplete. It would be improved by listing step-by-step how to get the environment set up, what to work on, how to engage with the project team to get help
• Governance: Project does not yet have a written governance file (this is not a blocking issue for Sandbox acceptance)
• Roadmap: is incomplete, listing three items. It would be improved with task breakdown / whos-working-on-it / schedule
• Maintainer File: lists 3 maintainers. All maintainers are AXA employees

This review is for the TOC’s information only. Sandbox projects are not required to have full governance or contributor documentation.

[linsun]

Hi, thanks for submitting this. I looked up AXA France, it appears to be an insurance company, would you consider yourself an end user? (obviously, you are creator for this project also!)

Also, what platform do you support? I noticed a Microsoft dotnet dependency: https://github.com/AxaFrance/SlimFaas/blob/main/Dockerfile#L12

[guillaume-chervet]

Hi @linsun slimfaas is compile in native mode for amd64 and arm64 plafeform (we can add more). Thank you, I will enhance the documentation with these informations.

https://hub.docker.com/r/axaguildev/slimfaas/tags

Yes we are consumer. We also use Keda.

We use in mainly with internal classical webapp recat exposed by nginx and api behind (java, .net, python, node, etc.). SlimFaas resolve the http trigger scale from 0 to 1. Even if it take a long time for provisionning a Virtual Machine.

We use async mode mainly for our AI project. Mainly to read documents in real time. It require microservice architecture and queue system in front of each pods (example for OCR)

We use it also for our GenAI platfeform.

[linsun]

I found your story fascinating! BTW, what are the dependencies of the project? You mentioned no need for knative or OpenFaas.

[guillaume-chervet]

Hi @rochaporto , yes the licence is MIT.
I'am not sure to know what is tag-runtime.

The particularity of SlimFaas is that is not an operator. It take part of the application delivered by developpers.

I will answer more to your question next week and I will complete missing documentation.

I have also this video which can help (but in french) https://youtu.be/ovRVG0mOxdc?si=VcHG6LBHJ6wzxa2x

[guillaume-chervet]

Hi @linsun , SlimFaas has no architecture dependencies appart the need to save data somewhere (it is a database).

It aim to be plug and play on existing projects with the less coupling as possible.

Internally it use https://dotnet.github.io/dotNext/ to create redis like database. It use classical RAFT protocol.

I'am working on the scale out. I am scrapping /metrics routes to get information and I am following PromQL syntax to keep configuration like Keda syntax, but whithout any infrastructure dependencies.