eks-distro VS OpenFaaS

EKS Anywhere builds on the strengths of Amazon EKS Distro, the same open-source distribution of Kubernetes that is used by Amazon EKS on the cloud, thus fostering consistency and compatibility between clusters both on AWS as well as on-premises.

yes im aware of bmctl. however you dont have control over the kubernetes distro that's running.

is there anything similar to https://github.com/aws/eks-distro ?

EKS-A focuses on cluster management for HA environments. By default we use 3 etcd nodes, 2 control plane nodes, and 3 worker nodes. It uses cilium as the default CNI and Cluster API controllers for continual cluster state management. It has some optional configuration for a flux controller and OIDC authentication but it doesn't add default services or workloads. EKS-A also uses EKS Distro which is the open source Kubernetes distribution we run in hosted EKS.

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.).