Async

Asynchronous Functions

OpenFaaS enables long-running tasks or function invocations to run in the background through the use of NATS JetStream or NATS Streaming. This decouples the HTTP transaction between the caller and the function.

• The HTTP request is serialized to NATS through the gateway as a "producer".
• The queue-worker acts as a subscriber and deserializes the HTTP request and uses it to invoke the function directly

The asynchronous workflow can have a longer, separate timeout compared with synchronous timeout on the gateway.

Why might you want to use an asynchronous invocation?

You're working with a partner's webhook. They send you data, but if you don't send a HTTP 200 OK within 1 second, they assume failure and retry the message. This works well if your function can complete in less than a second on every invocation, but if there's any risk that it can't, you need another solution. So you will give your partner a URL to the asynchronous function URL instead and it will reply within several milliseconds whilst still processing the data.

Synchronous vs asynchronous invocation

• Sync

  A synchronous invocation of a user requesting a PDF would be as follows, where connections are established between each component from the beginning to the end of the invocation.

  

If the whole process takes less than a few seconds, this may be the ideal approach, given that it's simple to implement.

• Async

  An asynchronous invocation of a user requesting a PDF would be as follows: an initial connection is formed to the gateway, the user's request is serialized to a queue via the queue-worker and NATS. At a later time, the queue-worker then dequeues the request, deserializes it and makes it to the function - either directly or via the gateway using a synchronous call.

  

  This is beneficial if there are for instance 100 requests that all take 2 minutes to execute. It means the client / caller needs to wait only for a new milliseconds.

How it works

Any function can be invoked asynchronously by changing the route on the gateway from /function/<name> to /async-function/<name>. A 202 Accepted message will be issued in response to asynchronous calls.

Note: that asynchronous invocations do not make sense with a HTTP GET verb since they are queued and deferred, there is nothing to GET. For this reason, a HTTP POST is required.

If you would like to receive a value from an asynchronous call you should pass a HTTP header with the URL to be used for the call-back.

$ faas invoke figlet -H "X-Callback-Url=https://request.bin/mybin"

It will pass back the X-Call-Id you had when you sent the initial request.

You can use netcat to check the Call Id during invocation:

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/async-function/figlet \
  --data "Hi" \
  --header "X-Callback-Url: http://<your-ip>:8888"

$ nc -l 8888
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 174
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2018 09:24:55 GMT
X-Call-Id: eb8283f5-1679-48e0-afec-194544b054aa
X-Duration-Seconds: 0.002885
X-Start-Time: 1543915495384346700

 _   _      _ _       
| | | | ___| | | ___  
| |_| |/ _ \ | |/ _ \ 
|  _  |  __/ | | (_) |
|_| |_|\___|_|_|\___/ 

Alternatively you can specify another asynchronous or synchronous function to run instead.

Making an asynchronous call from another function

You cannot use the address 127.0.0.1 when calling the gateway from within a function, because this refers to the function's container and local network, not the gateway's.

Instead, use the following URL: http://gateway.openfaas.svc.cluster.local:8080/async-function/NAME

The suffix minimises unnecessary DNS lookups, so increases performance. This suffix is usually svc.cluster.local, however, this may vary between clusters.

For a synchronous call, use http://gateway.openfaas.svc.cluster.local:8080/function/NAME.

The same URL applies for any X-Callback-Url that you wish to pass.

Configuration & Limits

There are limits for asynchronous functions, which you should understand before using them:

• Timeouts - the timeout for any asynchronous function must "agree" with all other timeouts within the system, including the gateway and the function.
• Concurrency / parallelism - the amount of function invocations processed at any one time.
• Named queues - by default there is one queue, but additional queues can be added. Each named queue can have its own timeout and concurrency.
• Payload size - the maximum size is configured to be 1MB. The limit is defined by NATS, but can be changed. Use a database, or S3 bucket for storing large payloads, and pass an identifier to function calls.
• Retries - retries are available in OpenFaaS Pro with an exponential back-off.

The queue-worker uses a single timeout for how long it will spend processing a message, that is called ack_wait. If your longest function can run for 25 minutes, then the ack_wait should be set to at least 25m.

Parallelism

OpenFaaS CE supports max_inflight of 1, OpenFaaS Pro supports a custom value.

By default there is one queue-worker replica deployed which is set up to run a single task of up to 30 seconds in duration.

You can increase the parallelism by setting the queue worker's "max_inflight" option to a value greater than one. This will cause the queue-worker to concurrently receive up to max_inflight many messages and simultaneously invoke their corresponding functions. Should you wish to restrict concurrency for certain functions, please make use of multiple queues and separate these functions accordingly.

Additional replicas of the queue-worker can also be added, such that the total async concurrency for a cluster will be: max_inflight * (number of queue-worker replicas).

So a value of max_inflight 100 and 1 queue-worker, will mean a system-wide async concurrency of 100. A value of max_inflight 100 and 3 queue-workers, will mean a system-wide async concurrency of 300.

Kubernetes users can tune this in the values.yaml file of the openfaas helm chart. faasd users should edit the docker-compose.yml file.

The official eBook for OpenFaaS has more details on the async system in OpenFaaS. See also: Training

Dedicated queues

OpenFaaS Pro supports a single shared queue for asynchronous requests. OpenFaaS Enterprise supports dedicated queues per function.

Asynchronous requests are processed by the queue-worker component using a single topic (faas-request), for most use-cases this will be sufficient if most of your functions take a similar amount of time to execute. A problem may arise when you have a mixture of slow and fast running requests within the same single queue. A single slow task can hold up all the other requests and this is because the queue has FIFO semantics - first in, first out.

To use multiple queues you need to do two things:

1) Annotate your functions with a com.openfaas.queue queue or (topic) name

Imagine that your new queue is called slow-queue, you would run the following:

faas-cli store deploy figlet --annotation com.openfaas.queue=slow-queue

2) Create a queue-worker for the new queue name

You now need to deploy a new queue-worker for the queue name, so that it can subscribe to messages and invoke functions without affecting the default queue.

If you are using JetStream (you have set queueMode: jetstream in your values.yaml file) then you can use the queue-worker helm chart to deploy the additional queue.

helm upgrade slow-queue openfaas/queue-worker \
  --install \
  --namespace openfaas \
  --set maxInflight=5 \
  --set nats.stream.name=slow-queue \
  --set nats.consumer.durableName=slow-queue-workers \
  --set upstreamTimeout=15m

After deploying your queue-worker using one of these methods you can invoke your function as per normal and watch the logs of the new queue worker:

kubectl logs deploy/slow-queue-worker -n openfaas

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/async-function/figlet -d "Ran on the slow-queue"

Verbose Output

The Queue Worker component enables asynchronous processing of function requests. The default verbosity level hides the message content, but this can be viewed by setting write_debug to true when deploying.

Callback request headers

The following additional request headers will be set when invoking the call back URL:

Header	Description
X-Call-Id	The original function call's tracing UUID
X-Duration-Seconds	Time taken in seconds to execute the original function call
X-Function-Status	HTTP status code returned by the original function call
X-Function-Name	The name of the original function that was executed