OpenFaaS VS LocalStack

Here’s a GitHub repo for an open-source serverless framework, if you want to experiment without full cloud lock-in.

As part of my research, I needed to evaluate the performance of Firecracker in serverless environments compared to traditional Linux containers. OpenFaaS, with its modular design, offered an excellent framework for this comparison. OpenFaas offered two running modes, which were OpenFaas using Kubernetes and faasd. Firecracker-containerd isn’t directly supported by Kubernetes due to the lack of a stable CRI plugin unless you consider the now unsupported Firekube. Extending faasd to support Firecracker is simpler and served as sufficient proof of concept from my research. Otherwise, from a general point of view, the primary advantage of Firecracker over LXC in serverless computing is isolation, which isn’t crucial if you’re running faasd since serverless loads on faasd are typically trusted. So, there is no big need to do this other than plain curiosity.

The FaaS platform gained a lot of popularity which resulted in many competitors. There was OSS providers like OpenFaaS or Fission. There were of course the commercial versions to like Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions.

Serverless functions are now offered by many cloud providers, as well as having options like OpenFaaS, Knative, Apache's Openwhisk and more from the open source community that run in environments ranging from one server all the way up to globally replicated private clusters.

OpenFaaS

Did you consider running knative or openfaas? https://github.com/openfaas/faas

Anyone knows other alternatives for Azure Functions, but for DIY hosting? ( eg. OpenFaas - https://www.openfaas.com/ )

Maybe OpenFaaS with grafana and slack notifications for non-200 responses?

But it didn't start that way. When first starting with serverless, I struggled a lot. I was used to running applications and their dependencies locally during development. With serverless, this proved to be a lot more difficult. There are tools like LocalStack, but back then, it wasn't as mature as it is today. I struggled to find a good balance between rapid feedback and confidence that what I built was working.

LocalStack - AWS Cloud Service Emulator

Download the LocalStack Desktop app from the LocalStack website.

For more information and to get started with LocalStack, visit their GitHub repository and dive into the comprehensive documentation available.

LocalStack is a cloud service emulator that runs in a single container on your laptop or in your CI environment. With LocalStack, you can run your AWS applications or Lambdas entirely on your local machine without connecting to a remote cloud provider! Whether you are testing complex CDK applications or Terraform configurations, or just beginning to learn about AWS services, LocalStack helps speed up and simplify your testing and development workflow.

With over 52,000 stars and 520+ contributors, LocalStack is an open-source tool that emulates a wide range of AWS services on a local machine. It's primarily used for testing and development purposes, allowing developers to run applications locally without needing to interact with the actual AWS cloud.

LocalStack GitHub: localstack-github