Vue Storefront VS OpenFaaS

We're currently building an integration between Vue Storefront (https://www.vuestorefront.io/) and WooCommerce.

If you are looking for a production-ready Nuxt application with Shopify, check out https://www.vuestorefront.io/ and especially, the integration with Shopify https://docs.vuestorefront.io/shopify/.

Vue Storefront is an open source frontend framework for headless ecommerce built on top of Vue.js. It provides ready-made integrations to existing ecommerce platforms and allows you to extend the framework to build your own integration.

To enable Cache on the browser level, we will be using a http-cache package from Vue Storefront that you can check out here.

For the storefront you have many options. For instance, there is Vue Storefront or Next.js Commerce.

Vue storefront is an open source platform that provides a storefront for ecommerce platforms. Although it integrates with many monolithic platforms, it is made specifically for headless commerce platforms.

The point of headless is that your data can come from anywhere. Shopify can hold the product images, the prices, the inventory, or it could only deal with the order management and none of the product information. You could build all of your products in something like Contentful. Have a look at https://www.vuestorefront.io/ might give you a better sense of how these things can integrate together.

Vue Storefront 2: https://github.com/vuestorefront/vue-storefront/discussions

I present to you the dream stack -> Vue Storefront & Vendure.

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.).