Overview
OpenFaaS Pro¶
OpenFaaS Pro is a commercially licensed distribution of OpenFaaS with additional features, configurations and commercial support from the founders.
Do we need the Community Edition or Pro?
OpenFaaS Community Edition (CE) is meant for open-source developers, OpenFaaS Pro is meant for production.
Core platform¶
Efficiency and redundancy:
- New auto-scaling engine to get the scaling just right either on Requests Per Second (RPS), Inflight requests or CPU.
- Scale idle functions to zero to save on compute costs, increase efficiency and lower your threat profile
- Retry failed invocations for functions to handle issues with downstream APIs and back-pressure on concurrency-limited functions
- CPU and RAM usage metrics for every function to measure usage and fine-tune limits
Scaling that works for various types of functions
The OpenFaaS Pro autoscaler emits detailed usage information, meaning functions can scale not just on requests per second, but inflight requests and CPU utilisation.
Usability and operations:
The OpenFaaS dashboard integrates with CPU & RAM usage metrics, and container logs to give you insights on your functions in one place. You can also add metadata from your source control management tool like a SHA, owner, project or URL to the source code.
Events and triggers¶
Event-driven programming and triggers:
- Trigger functions via Kafka for event-driven functions and to integrate with your existing systems
- Trigger functions from AWS SQS to integrate with events from AWS.
Workload tuning¶
To avoid errors when scaling up or down, you may need to tune your function's configuration to suit how it works. Pro users get access to fine-tune health checks, set custom Kubernetes service accounts and termination grace periods for shutting down functions.
- Custom HTTP health checks for functions - including path, period seconds and initial delay
- Custom Kubernetes service accounts for functions to access the Kubernetes API
- Custom runtime profiles for security & isolation using gVisor, kata containers etc.
- Custom TerminationGracePeriod for draining work for long running functions
- Custom support for probing Istio endpoints during scale from zero
Read more: OpenFaaS workloads and Custom Profiles
Enterprise security¶
- Single Sign-On using OpenID Connect (OIDC) means each user authenticates with their own identity, instead of sharing one set of credentials, which is insecure. Use your existing OIDC-compatible Identity Provider (IdP).
Platform building features¶
Build functions at scale - for services providers and large teams:
- Build functions via REST API using source code without the need to create and manage dozens or hundreds of independent CI jobs.
On our roadmap¶
Recently released:
- Scaling upon inflight requests for long running & memory/CPU bound functions (released Jan 2022)
- A new Pro UI dashboard for managing and monitoring OpenFaaS functions across namespaces (released March 2022)
- CPU and RAM usage metrics within the OpenFaaS API, CLI and Pro UI dashboard (released Feb 2022)
- AWS SQS event-connector (released January 2022)
Upcoming:
- Redesigned async system with NATS JetStream which replaces NATS Streaming (shipping soon)
- NATS Streaming is available for CE and will be deprecated in June 2023.
- Dedicated Helm chart for installing additional queue-workers with JetStream
- Structured logging / JSON for OpenFaaS Pro customers in the queue-worker (shipping soon)
- Concurrency limiting for functions - i.e. one request per container
- Enhanced RBAC for functions and the OpenFaaS REST API
- AMQP event trigger for RabbitMQ and Azure Service Bus
- Enhanced multi-tenant isolation for large organisations and service providers
Is there something else you need for your team or organisation? Get in touch with us here.
Comparison¶
Do we need the Community Edition or Pro?
OpenFaaS Community Edition (CE) is meant for basic exploration, OpenFaaS Pro is meant for production.
OpenFaaS Pro is built to run in production, with reliability, security and durability in mind. It's the first step towards building a relationship with the team who make OpenFaaS, and comes with exclusive features and configurations that most customers will need to operate a product or service.
Support
| Description | OpenFaaS CE | OpenFaaS Pro | OpenFaaS Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suitability | Open Source developers and basic exploration | Production, business critical, or PoC | Production, business critical, or PoC |
| Support via email | N/a | Pro features only | Response within 1 business day |
| Support via GitHub | N/a | Pro features only | Response within 1 business day |
| Support via Slack | N/a | N/a | Up to 5 developers |
| Access to Customer Community | N/a | Private access to Customer Community for 2 named contacts | As Per Pro, for more named contacts |
Enterprise Support comes with an SLA, defined separately. Support for OpenFaaS Pro is on a self-service basis, with no SLA offered.
The Customer Community provides direct access to developers of OpenFaaS, and other customers for exclusive configurations & guides, early access to features, collaboration and announcements.
Core features
| Description | OpenFaaS CE | OpenFaaS Pro | OpenFaaS Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Async / queueing | NATS Streaming (deprecated in June 2023) | NATS JetStream (new) | As per Pro |
| Dashboard | Basic, legacy UI portal (in code-freeze) | Dashboard with metrics, logs and multiple namespaces | As per Pro |
| Metrics | HTTP invocation metrics | Plus CPU/RAM usage metrics and async/queue metrics | As per Pro |
| CPU & RAM utilization | Not available | Integrated with Prometheus metrics, OpenFaaS REST API & CLI | As per Pro |
| Autoscaling strategy | RPS-only | CPU utilization, Capacity (inflight requests) or RPS | As per Pro |
| Autoscaling granularity | Single rule for all functions | Custom per functions | As per Pro |
| Scale to Zero | Not supported | Custom delay per function | As per Pro |
| Kubernetes service accounts for functions | N/a | Supported per function | As per Pro |
| Grafana Dashboards | N/a | 3x dashboards supplied in Customer Community | As per Pro |
Platform features
| Description | OpenFaaS CE | OpenFaaS Pro | OpenFaaS Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deploy functions via REST API | Available | As per CE | As per CE |
| Build containers and functions via REST API | N/a | Supported | As per Pro |
| Multiple namespace support | N/a | Supported with Kubernetes | As per Pro |
Durability and reliability
| Description | OpenFaaS CE | OpenFaaS Pro | OpenFaaS Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Health checks | Not supported | Custom HTTP path and intervals per function | As per Pro |
| Retry failed invocations | Not supported | Retry certain HTTP codes with a back-off | As per Pro |
| Highly Available messaging | Not available for NATS Streaming | Available for NATS JetStream, with 3x servers. | As per Pro |
| Long executions of async functions | Manual configuration | Automated configuration with NATS JetStream | As per Pro |
Security
| Description | OpenFaaS CE | OpenFaaS Pro | OpenFaaS Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authentication | Shared token with every user | Sign-On with OIDC Okta/Auth0 | Custom Single Sign-On with your IdP |
| Split installation without ClusterAdmin role | N/a | Provided in Customer Community | As Per Pro |
| Compatibility with Istio for mTLS | N/a | Supported | As per Pro |
| GDPR | Sensitive information printed in logs | Sensitive information is omitted from logs | As per Pro |
| Secure isolation with Kata containers or gVisor | N/a | Supported via a runtimeClass | As per Pro |
Event-brokers
| Description | OpenFaaS CE | OpenFaaS Pro | OpenFaaS Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kafka broker | Not supported | Supports SASL or TLS auth, Aiven, Confluent and self-hosted | As per Pro |
| AWS SQS | Not supported | Supported | As per Pro |
| Cron and scheduled invocations | Community support | Community support | Full support |
Trusted by¶
OpenFaaS Pro is trusted by:
- Fortune 500 company (semiconductor / global technology)
- Fortune 500 company (financial services)
- Check Point Software Technologies Ltd (Global 2000 company)
- Yokogawa Electric Corporation (Global 2000 company)
- Waylay.io
- RateHub.ca
- Surge "workwithsurge"
- Edge Delta
Tell us about your use-case for OpenFaaS Pro, CE or faasd and see what other companies are doing in the: ADOPTERS.md file
Support¶
OpenFaaS Enterprise comes with support for the Certified Open Source Components and OpenFaaS Pro, with support via email within a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Along with email support, each team gets their own dedicated Slack channel for questions, collaboration and assistance.
OpenFaaS Pro operates on a self-service model with support for OpenFaaS Pro features only via email.
Both tiers come with access to the Customer Community, for feedback & collaboration with the OpenFaaS developers and other customers.
No support is offered to commercial users of OpenFaaS CE, which is primarily meant for exploration and open source developers.
Getting started¶
OpenFaaS Pro is primarily developed for Kubernetes, however most of the features are also compatible with faasd. Learn about faasd and OpenFaaS Pro here: The Event-Driven Edge with OpenFaaS
Are you interested in OpenFaaS for your organisation? Contact us to find out more.