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Deployment

OpenFaaS can be deployed to a variety of container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, K3s, OpenShift, or to a single host with faasd.

OpenFaaS Pro - Standard or for Enterprises (production, commercial use)

OpenFaaS Pro is a commercially supported version of OpenFaaS which is designed and licensed for production use. The two variants are:

  • OpenFaaS Standard - intended for single teams, single-tenanted environments

  • OpenFaaS for Enterprises - intended for larger organisations or SaaS vendors wanting to integrate functions into their product

  • Deploy OpenFaaS Pro - Standard or for Enterprises

See also:

OpenFaaS Community Edition (CE) for Kubernetes

The Community Edition of OpenFaaS is intended for personal use only, and has a 60-day limit for commercial use.

A foreword on security

Authentication is enabled by default with OpenFaaS, however you will also need to obtain a TLS certificate for your cluster if you are using OpenFaaS on the public Internet. Free certificates are available from LetsEncrypt.org.

There are three recommended ways to install OpenFaaS to a Kubernetes cluster:

  • Using our CLI installer arkade - (recommended)
  • With the Helm chart, Flux or ArgoCD (GitOps workflow)
  • Or using the statically generated YAML files (not recommended)

Find out more about each option and how to deploy OpenFaaS to Kubernetes:

Deploy to Kubernetes

faasd - Serverless for everyone else

faasd is OpenFaaS, reimagined without the complexity and cost of Kubernetes. It runs well on a single host with very modest requirements, and is largely API-compatible with OpenFaaS on Kubernetes. Under the hood it uses containerd and Container Networking Interface (CNI) along with the same core components from OpenFaaS CE.

When should you use faasd over OpenFaaS CE on Kubernetes?

  • You're building automation/glue-code, web portals, cron jobs, bots, or webhook receivers.
  • You want to be able to run your code locally, using containers.
  • You want a way to do remote deployments over a REST API.
  • You either don't have the bandwidth to manage or learn Kubernetes.
  • You don't need planet scale.

You may also be interested in:

  • Deploying to constrained IoT or edge devices
  • Shrink-wrapping functions into a VM image to deploy for customers or clients.

Deploy faasd

OpenShift - 3.x / 4.x

OpenShift is a variant of Kubernetes produced by Red Hat.

You can deploy to OpenShift using the standard Helm chart as per the Kubernetes instructions, or with arkade.

Deploy to OpenShift