FaaS, or Function-as-a-Service, is a considerable application engineering trend under observation by the Service Tooling research initiative of the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Yesterday, the lab’s semi-regular open-for-all evening seminar series, Future Cloud Applications, centered around tools for managing the growing FaaS ecosystem. While the open source tools prototypically produced through the initiative are primarily of interest to Swiss software application engineers and cloud providers, the research challenges continuously uncovered by the work are more fundamental and encompass some harder nuts to crack in dedicated research projects. This blog reflects on what has been achieved already and what needs to be accomplished in the next years.
Month: April 2017
In our previous blog post we explained how networking works in Rancher in a Cattle environment. There we also mentioned that we have been working on enabling Rancher to operate on heterogeneous compute infrastructures – for example, a mixed environment comprised of ARM based edge devices connected to VMs running in the cloud. In this blog post we go into more detail on how we built rancher-agent service for aarch64 ARM based devices.
Before we begin, the following list of hardware and OS was used during this work:
- Raspeberry Pi 3 model B
- Suse Leap 42.2 aarch64
- Docker v1.10.3
Rancher Labs had done some work already on supporting multi-arch hosts – most of it on enabling rancher-agent to work on ARM based devices – but as the Rancher platform evolved this has been deprioritized. Back then most of the rancher-agent scheduling and networking services running in the host were consolidated into a single container (agent-instance) and this was ported to ARM based devices as described in this blog post. From rancher-agent version v1.1.0, these micro services were split into separate containers giving the user the option to select which scheduling or networking solution to use. Once this (significant) change to rancher-agent was made, Rancher Labs stopped progressing support for ARM devices. Continue reading
Project Management SaaS, or short PMSaaS, is a web-based tool for project management developed as part of an apprenticeship in computer engineering for application development (as part of advanced education) at the Service Prototyping Lab. The user can create new projects and employee accounts, add work packages and tasks to projects, assign employees to tasks, book hours for them, compare the booked hours to the planned person months, weigh each month differently and add expenses. The project can be edited, shared with other users and archived. To make it easier to keep track of all these things, the tool generates different graphs. This work is a result of exploring how project management can be offered as a service.
As noted elsewhere, we’re looking at Rancher in the context of one of our projects. We’ve been doing some work on enabling it to work over heterogeneous compute infrastructures – one of which could be an ARM based edge device and one a standard x86_64 cloud execution environment. Some of our colleagues were asking how the networking works – we had not looked into this in much detail, so we decided to find – turns out it’s pretty complex.
Have you created a highly popular and frequently used JavaScript (Node.js) functions for execution in Google Cloud Functions? In this case, the economics of FaaS turn against you due to the per-invocation pricing. You might want to have more options for both testing the same function locally and for deploying it into an environment with fixed monthly pricing. This blog post explains step-by-step how to migrate functions from FaaS environments into a fixed per-month pricing container environment. The running example will be Node.js functions running in Google Cloud Functions albeit the procedure is similarly applicable to other combinations.
On the 21st of March we held the 15th OpenStack meetup. As ever, the talks were interesting, relevant and entertaining. It was kindly sponsored by Rackspace and held at their offices in Zürich. Much thanks goes to them and to previous sponsors!
At this meetup there were 2 talks and an interactive and impromptu panel discussion on the recent operator’s meetup in Milan.
The first talk was by Giuseppe Paterno who shared the experience in eBay on the workloads that are running there upon OpenStack.
Next up was Geoff Higginbottom from Rackspace who showed how to use Nagios and StackStorm to automate the recovery of OpenStack services. This was interesting from the lab’s perspective as much of what Geoff talked about was related to our Cloud Incident Management initiative. You can see almost the same talk that Geoff gave at the OpenStack Nordic Days.
The two presentations were followed up by the panel discussion involving those that attended including our own Seán Murphy and was moderated by Andy Edmonds. Finally, as is now almost a tradition, we had a very nice apero!
Looking forward to the next and 16th OpenStack meetup!
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