Deploy OpenFaaS Community Edition (CE) to Kubernetes¶

For personal use only, commercial usage is limited

Before installing OpenFaaS CE within a commercial environment, make sure you understand the 60-day limit on usage per commercial organisation, along with the limits of this version of OpenFaaS vs the Standard and Enterprise edition.

Before deploying OpenFaaS Community Edition (CE), you will need to create a Kubernetes cluster. The cluster will need to have full access to the Internet at all times. If you need airgap support, or to run on an offline or restricted enterprise network, then OpenFaaS Standard would be a better fit for your needs.

In our experience, OpenFaaS CE and Pro will run on any Kubernetes cluster, whether that's a local version, self-managed on-premises, or a managed cloud offering.

Overview¶

There are many options for deploying a local or remote cluster. You can read about the various Kubernetes distributions here.

The OpenFaaS helm chart ships with its own stack that includes NATS, Prometheus and a number of its own components like the OpenFaaS gateway and queue-worker, for more about what's included, you can read up on the stack.

The chart can be installed with helm and kubectl or arkade, we recommend arkade which also prints out everything you need to know to access the UI and deploy your first function.

From there, you should consider: adding a TLS certificate and trying out one of our training courses commissioned by the CNCF/LinuxFoundation, or an eBook.

Options for local cluster clusters¶

A local cluster is recommended for development and testing, however you can also use managed Kubernetes if you wish.

KinD - upstream Kubernetes in a container with Docker
k3d - K3s in a container with Docker
k3s - a light-weight Kubernetes distribution ideal for development, edge and IoT
minikube - the original way to run Kubernetes on your local machine, with a separate Virtual Machine such as in this guide
microk8s - a Kubernetes distribution, specifically by Canonical for Ubuntu users.

We recommend using KinD to deploy OpenFaaS, however there are many different ways to run Kubernetes on your machine using a container, or a Virtual Machine.

Options for remote clusters¶

Self-hosted Kubernetes:

k3sup ("ketchup") can be used to build a single or multi-node cluster using cloud VMs

Guides for managed Kubernetes engines:

Install the `faas-cli`¶

The faas-cli is required to manage OpenFaaS and to deploy functions:

Install the faas-cli

Install OpenFaaS Pro with `arkade` or `helm`¶

If you have purchased an OpenFaaS Pro or OpenFaaS for Enterprises license, use the following link:

Install OpenFaaS Pro

Install OpenFaaS Community Edition (CE) via `arkade` or `helm`¶

There are three recommended ways to install OpenFaaS and you can pick whatever makes sense for you and your team. All options use the OpenFaaS helm chart.

1) Arkade (our recommended option) We recommend using arkade to install openfaas, which makes installing OpenFaaS a 1-liner. It still uses the Helm chart, so it can also be used in production.

2) Helm A helm chart is also available for those who are very well versed with kubectl and want to understand exactly what is being installed.

3) GitOps tooling Whilst not recommended for local development, you may want to install OpenFaaS using a GitOps tool in your production environments because these can be configured to keep the chart up to date automatically.

1) Deploy the Chart with `arkade` (fastest option)¶

The arkade install command installs OpenFaaS using its official helm chart. arkade can also install other important software for OpenFaaS users such as cert-manager and nginx-ingress. It's the easiest and quickest way to get up and running.

You can use arkade to install OpenFaaS to a regular cloud cluster, your laptop, a VM, a Raspberry Pi, or a 64-bit Arm machine.

Get arkade

# For MacOS / Linux:
curl -SLsf https://get.arkade.dev/ | sudo sh

# For Windows (using Git Bash)
curl -SLsf https://get.arkade.dev/ | sh

Install the OpenFaaS app

arkade install openfaas

Other options for installation are available with arkade install openfaas --help

After the installation you'll receive a command to retrieve your OpenFaaS URL and password.

  Info for app: openfaas
  # Get the faas-cli
  curl -SLsf https://cli.openfaas.com | sudo sh

  # Forward the gateway to your machine
  kubectl rollout status -n openfaas deploy/gateway
  kubectl port-forward -n openfaas svc/gateway 8080:8080 &

  # If basic auth is enabled, you can now log into your gateway:
  PASSWORD=$(kubectl get secret -n openfaas basic-auth -o jsonpath="{.data.basic-auth-password}" | base64 --decode; echo)
  echo -n $PASSWORD | faas-cli login --username admin --password-stdin

  faas-cli store deploy figlet
  faas-cli list

  # For Raspberry Pi
  faas-cli store list \
  --platform armhf

  faas-cli store deploy figlet \
  --platform armhf

  # Find out more at:
  # https://github.com/openfaas/faas
  ```

You can get this information back at any time using:

```bash
arkade info openfaas

A good place to go next is the official training material for OpenFaaS including courses and eBooks.

If you would like to set up public access with a TLS certificate and a custom domain, then follow this tutorial: Get TLS for OpenFaaS the easy way with arkade

2) Deploy the OpenFaaS Chart with `helm`¶

We recommend that you set up OpenFaaS using arkade, however the helm chart is also provided on GitHub:

OpenFaaS Helm chart

You'll find additional charts and arkade apps for components like the cron-connector and certain OpenFaaS Pro event sources for Kafka and AWS SQS.

3) GitOps Tooling¶

There are two popular options for installing the OpenFaaS helm chart with a GitOps approach.

These are advanced tools for use in production and are not recommended for local development.

ArgoCD
Flux v2
Flux v1 (considered deprecated)

Refer to the respective documentation for more information.

Troubleshooting¶

If you are running into any issues please check out the troubleshooting guide and search the documentation / past issues before raising an issue.

Troubleshooting guide

Support¶

OpenFaaS Ltd offers support and and a commercial distribution for Production called OpenFaaS Pro. Feel free to contact us for more.

Guidelines are also provided for preparing for production and for performance testing with OpenFaaS Pro.

Appendix¶

Private registries for your functions¶

See notes here: Private container registries with OpenFaaS

Community tutorials and blog posts¶

You can also find a list of community tutorials, events, and videos.

A note for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)¶

You'll need to create an RBAC role with the following command:

$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding "cluster-admin-$(whoami)" \
  --clusterrole=cluster-admin \
  --user="$(gcloud config get-value core/account)"

Also, ensure any default load-balancer timeouts within GKE are understood and configured appropriately.

Deploy with TLS¶

To enable TLS while using Helm, try one of the following references:

Setting an Image Pull Policy for your functions¶

Every time a function is deployed or is scaled up, Kubernetes will pull a potentially updated copy of the image from the registry. If you are using static image tags like latest, this is necessary.

When set to IfNotPresent, function deployments may not be updated when using static image tags like latest. IfNotPresent is particularly useful when developing locally with minikube. In this case, you can set your local environment to use minikube's docker so faas-cli build builds directly into the Docker library used by minikube. faas-cli push is unnecessary in this workflow - use faas-cli build then faas-cli deploy.

When set to Never, only local (or pulled) images will work. This is useful if you want to tightly control which images are available and run in your Kubernetes cluster.

Using Raspberry Pi and Arm¶

Use arkade to install OpenFaaS, it will determine the correct files and container images to install OpenFaaS on an ARM device.

To build and deploy images for Raspberry Pi and Arm, see the notes here: Building multi-arch images for Arm and Raspberry Pi

For a complete tutorial (including OpenFaaS) see:

For the Function Store, use the --platform flag to filter to compatible images:

export OPENFAAS_URL=http://IP:8080/

faas-cli store list --platform armhf
faas-cli store deploy NAME --platform armhf

For 64-bit Arm OSes use --platform arm64 instead.