dapr VS OpenFaaS

Having containers is nice but everything (well ... nearly everything 😉) gets better with Dapr as an outstanding tool for app development in the container-based area. Here we go what might be worth a look:

A CNCF project, the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) provides APIs that simplify microservice connectivity. Whether your communication pattern is service to service invocation or pub/sub messaging, Dapr helps you write resilient and secured microservices. Essentially, it provides a new way to build microservices by using the reusable blocks implemented as sidecars.

I had no overview of the Dapr system which caused me a lot of time in trying to get to the root cause. So first thing I did was to create a nice dashboard where we can have an overview of our Dapr services and their certificates. I started from the official one from Grafana for this. But the dashboard is a bit outdated so I had some issues with the queries, so I did some changes and you can find the JSON of the dashboard below if it helps anyone.

I would like to build modules, either in a modular monolith style, or in a microservice style using DAPR and/or Tye.

Just heard about Dapr last week. Might be more than what you are asking, though but it’s probably worth a look.

https://dapr.io/

From my perspective, I’d like to explore further how Dapr can integrate with other Supabase features. It would also be great to see a Supabase state store as a built-in component that’s available in the Dapr runtime without the need of running the pluggable component separately. I also hope the proposed DocumentStore building block will get some traction this year, since this will pair up very nicely with Supabase and other PostgreSQL stores.

Could you use Kubernetes to solve this? Have a single pod running the Redis instance and then multiple running Node.js talking to the Redis instance via something like DAPR (https://dapr.io/)

Dapr is also building a workflow orchestrator into their microservice system. It's almost in Beta, and when you combine it with Dapr's Virtual Actors, it looks powerful. It will also let you integrate a workflow engine like Temporal, too. https://dapr.io/

This fantastic blog from Mauricio (Salaboy) Salatino shows how tools like Kratix (kratix.io) and Dapr (dapr.io) can help streamline golden paths: https://blog.dapr.io/posts/2023/04/02/creating-dapr-enabled-platforms-with-kratix/

Recently, the Dapr maintainers released V1.10 of Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr), a developer framework for building cloud-native applications, making it easier to run multiple microservices on Kubernetes and interact with external state stores/databases, secret stores, pub/sub-brokers, and other cloud services and self-hosted solutions.

OpenFaaS - https://www.openfaas.com

This is where I see K8S coming in – teachers can provide dev deployments that are setup for students to learn. Teachers can also provide containers that run automated tests against the student containers for assessment! Plus, we can smooth over some of the git workflow stuff for the ripest of beginners; we can integrate with github to sync their work on our platform to repositories on their github account, so that they can really take ownership of the work they do on the platform. Last, students can graduate their work from development into production very easily, since we can take the base images + student diffs, build a new "prod" image for the student. We can run students' prod work on "serverless" K8S frameworks like fission or OpenFaas to be able to host many low-traffic "production" apps at the same time.

OpenFAAS or FN Project are options

Closest thing I can think of is https://www.openfaas.com (which runs on top of K8s).

OpenFaaS for the serverless functions

If you want to look into FaaS in selfhosted ways, take a look at OpenFaaS, which nowadays works on Kubernetes though - https://www.openfaas.com/. Note that the CE version of OpenFaaS only includes some basic autoscaling. For more complex solutions check out their paid version.

The two biggest options are OpenWhisk and OpenFaas. Check out /r/serverless for more options. I'm experimenting currently with OpenFaas as it's the lighter weigh to of the two.

The other case where it may not be useful is in some internal applications. Maintaining a helm chart for an application can end up being a sizable amount of work, and they do not allow arbitrary inputs, so if you miss some key (i.e. "imagePullSecrets,") you can end up spending a lot of time key-chasing across your charts. I have heard of folks using Kustomize in such a situation, although another option is to use a meta chart (one chart for many apps) or Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) framework like Serverless, OpenFaas, Knative, etc.

Do you want to use a FaaS or just toy with making your own? If you just want to use something check out OpenFaaS, it's very easy to get started and is well documented: https://www.openfaas.com/

If you want to build your own FaaS, I'd still explore OpenFaaS as its creator has documented a lot of its creation and you will soon discover the critical things you'll need to figure out for building your own similar service (i.e. stuff like sandboxed execution environment, API gateway, scaling up and down functions, etc.).