So, in my last blog post, my servers had given me the middle finger and in the post before that, I had said that I was determined to do Robotics this year, stay focused and not take anything else on. Well, lets just put them crazy thoughts into the bin, we all knew I was going to epically fail them!
So in no particular order, here’s what’s been going on:
The Server
So, the new DL580 server is now working, I won’t mention I took a power drill to it, but let’s just say its playing ball. It’s now got a new raid card, HP Storage Works Array and 22TB of lovely storage ready for anything I may want to chuck at it. Its currently turned off at the moment but the reasons for that come up soon!
OpenFaas
Short version, its the t*ts, is epically cool! Go install it now!
So OpenFaas is an Open Source Function as a service framework (Think AWS Lambda, Azure Functions etc) which runs on top of Docker/Kubernetes and allows a developer to focus on creating call functions instead of infrastructure so much. It auto scales, supports tons of programming languages and has great analytics. It’s free and runs on practically any hardware including the Raspberry Pi. The Cloud addon to it (addon may not be the right word, maybe V2) makes things even easier by hooking into Github etc and then can automatically deploy after a commit. What really got me excited about this was that I could have a single package containing Python, Java and c# (for example) functions and not need to worry about any of the infrastructure needed to make them an API. I then could use a single command to deploy it all to my server!
There are other free FAAS solutions out there (FN, Azure Functions Runtime, Openwhisk, Serverless etc) but OpenFaas is extremely popular and only is getting stronger (13K stars on GitHub), has a great set of examples including a functions store and has a very helpful active Slack channel for support etc.
So, the reason the server has been off is partly that I have been waiting for some hard drives to turn up, and partly because of OpenFaas. Before I had discussed Faas, I was going to just build VM’s (Hyper-v) for all the servers I want. However, all that has changed now due to OpenFaas and I would really like all future stuff to work serverless. Because most Serverless frameworks seem to sit on top of Docker, there is some further research around Windows Server 2016 and containers needed to be done. The end result may be that I have to format my new server with Ubuntu, or create a Linux VM to host Docker on top of Windows. I still need to do some research as I believe WS2016 introduced mixed (Windows/Linux) containers for Docker.
Another Startup wants some Burf
Yup, I seem to be in demand, or it’s a way to stop me building Skynet (or some sort of killer robot). Another startup company, who is nearly ready to launch has asked me to help them out and get them across the line. It’s a fantastic opportunity which I am pretty excited about as I get to take ownership of the entire technology stack (which for once I don’t need to develop). My first challenge is around AWS and making sure their solution scale which should be fun! I will disclose more soon!
