An Introduction to Serverless DevOps with OpenFaaS

Published in

HackerNoon.com

7 min readOct 22, 2017

DevOps isn’t about just doing CI/CD. But a CI/CD pipeline has an important role inside DevOps. I’ve been investing my time on OpenFaaS recently and as I started creating multiple functions, I wanted an easy to use and accessible development and delivery flow, in other words a CI/CD pipeline.

One day as I was talking with Alex (the creator of OpenFaaS), he asked me to put together a guide about CI/CD of OpenFaaS (using Github and Travis CI). It was a perfect timing for me because I was actually thinking about how I could integrate my CI/CD pipelines I apply with other projects to the OpenFaaS serverless one. What I came up with is shown on the following diagram:

A high level overview is as below:

Push to GitHub
Pipeline starts
Builds function images
Creates a temporary Swarm Environment
Runs tests for the functions
Releases the images to a registry if the tests pass
Deploys the functions if the tests pass
Pipeline ends

For those who want to just dive in, the repository is published here. You can look inside the .travis.yml file to see the stages and commands of the pipeline.

I’ll explain the context step by step from here.

Using Docker and Swarm in Travis CI Builds

Alright, I’m not going into details of “how to use Travis CI”. There are plenty of good articles explaining this, and the official docs are well organized. The key points in using Travis for my use case are:

We’re going to use Docker and Swarm
We’re going to test using Node.js

As written in the docs we’ll need to include:

sudo: required

services:
  - docker

in our .travis.yml in order to use docker in builds. In addition, we want to be able to use docker-compose version 3.2 in order to deploy our OpenFaaS stack but this isn’t possible with Travis’ default docker version. Again, as the docs says, you’ll need to write:

before_install:
  - sudo apt-get update
  - sudo apt-get -y -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confnew" install docker-ce

in order to install a newer version of docker. If you miss this part you’ll see

unsupported Compose file version: 3.2

something like this in the pipeline and it’ll fail.

Creating a Temporary Testing Environment with Swarm

As shown in the diagram above, we need an OpenFaaS Environment in order to fully test the function (an e2e test). Creating a Swarm environment is easy, but preparing an OpenFaaS environment needs a little tuning for it to work properly.

In order to prepare our testing environments we’ll need to:

Fetch the OpenFaaS CLI tool (faas-cli)
Initialize Swarm
Deploy the Gateway and Function

Fetch the OpenFaaS CLI tool:
The OpenFaaS CLI tool (faas-cli) makes it easy to use OpenFaaS and we’ll definitely need it for the pipeline. It’s as easy as calling this command:

curl -sSL https://cli.openfaas.com | sudo sh

Initialize Swarm:
This is straight forward. Just call the command:

docker swarm init

Deploy the Gateway and Function:
Okay, this is the tricky part. Normally, deploying OpenFaaS is extremely easy. I really mean it. If you haven’t already, you should definitely have a look at Alex’s “FaaS and Furious — 0 to Serverless in 60 seconds, anywhere”. But deploying it for a CI/CD pipeline adds a little concern which you normally don’t need. It’s that the environment needs to be ready before the test runs. That means the Swarm Service needs to be ready. To accomplish this, I wrote a simple shell script function:

# This function checks if the service is in Running state
check_service_is_running() {
    local SERVICE_NAME=$1
    local STATE=$(docker service ps --format '{{json .CurrentState}}' $SERVICE_NAME)
    if [[ $STATE = \"Running* ]]; then
      echo 1
    else
      echo 0
    fi
}

This uses docker service ps to check the state of the service. If it is Running it returns 1 and other than that, it returns 0 . In addition to this functionality, we’ll need to retry until the service is ready so I added a retry function as well (it callscheck_service_is_running internally):

# This function waits for the service to become available.
# Retries for 10 times and 3 second interval (hard coded for now)
wait_for_service_to_start() {
    local n=1
    local max=10
    local delay=3local SERVICE_NAME=$1
    local SERVICE_IS_RUNNING=0
    while [  "$SERVICE_IS_RUNNING" -eq 0 ]; do
      if [[ $n -gt $max ]]; then
        echo "ERROR: Retried $(($n-1)) times but $SERVICE_NAME didn't start. Exiting" >&2
        exit 1
      fi
      SERVICE_IS_RUNNING=$(check_service_is_running $SERVICE_NAME)
      echo "Waiting for $SERVICE_NAME to start"
      n=$[$n+1]
      sleep $delay
    done
    echo "$SERVICE_NAME is Running"
}

Now that we can ensure the gateway and functions are running as expected, we can setup the environment with the commands below:

# deploy the stack to swarm
./deploy_stack.sh# build the functions (assuming 4 cores)
faas-cli build --parallel 4 -f stack.yml# we can't deploy unless the gateway is ready so wait
wait_for_service_to_start func_gateway
# and then deploy
faas-cli deploy -f stack.yml# wait for functions to become ready for testing
wait_for_service_to_start echo

The deploy_stack.sh is simply calling:

docker stack deploy func --compose-file docker-compose.yml

and deploying the stack inside Swarm. I want to reuse this shell on my local machine hence it is in an external file. faas-cli build creates the function images and faas-cli deploy deploys the functions via gateway. With this tweak, we can ensure a fully working OpenFaaS environment (you can check the complete script inside the ci-setup.sh file).

Testing the Function

Now that we have a testing environment, testing against it is pretty straight forward. You can choose any framework of your choice, but for this article I chose Node.js and the chakram library. The following test is a sample test for the echo function. Just checking if the response is the text I sent:

const chakram = require('chakram');
const expect = chakram.expect;const ENDPOINT = "http://localhost:8080/function/echo";describe("FaaS echo function", () => {
    it("should respond with the data you passed", () => {
        // Arrange
        const expected = "echo test";// Act
        return chakram.post(ENDPOINT, expected, {json: false})
            .then(response => {
                // Assert
                expect(response).to.have.status(200);
                expect(response.body).to.contain(expected);
            });
    });
});

Don’t forget to add the following lines to .travis.yml in order to use Node.js and cache libraries:

language: node_js
node_js:
  - "8"cache: yarn

Cleaning up Swarm

This is probably not necessary but I like to be symmetric so I’ve decided to clean up the Swarm environment:

docker swarm leave -f

Release and Deploy

After the tests pass as expected, we’d like to release the function images and deploy them to other environments (dev, stage, prod, whatever). This is straight forward and it is written in the travis ci docs, too:

after_success:
  - if [ "$TRAVIS_BRANCH" == "master" ]; then
    docker login -u="$DOCKER_USERNAME" -p="$DOCKER_PASSWORD";
    faas-cli push -f echo.yml
    fi

This means the images are pushed only if the tests succeed and it is on the master branch. faas-cli push pushes the functions to the registry. Another interesting part is the $DOCKER_USERNAME and $DOCKER_PASSWORD environment variable. You can set these credentials via the travis ci management console.

From the Settings, you can set Environment Variables:

Hence you don’t have to reveal your credentials inside the .travis.yml. While the commands above aren’t deploying to any environment, it is just a matter of triggering some deploy webhook (or something similar to that). So you’ll be executing some kind of trigger command here regardless of what backend you’re using (Swarm, Kubernetes, Cattle, etc).

Run the Pipeline!

Everything is prepared! Now let’s make some edits and trigger the pipeline. You should see something similar to this:

You should see the tests passing and the images getting released as well. An automated full pipeline!

Wrapping Up

In this post we’ve created a full CI/CD pipeline for OpenFaaS. You can replace the services to the ones you prefer, GitLab, Gogs, Jenkins, Circle CI, GoCD, Drone, etc. (you name it) and you can use them seamlessly on Cloud or On-Premise, anywhere you’d like. Needless to say but being able to completely take over control of the pipeline is a huge advantage!

Still, there are some things we could probably improve including:

Updating the docker every time to use the docker-compose ver: 3.2 in the beginning of the pipeline takes a bit time. Wish there was some kind of way to switch the docker version in Travis
The CI downloads the faas-cli every time. Perhaps we could create a faas-cli container and reuse it in the pipeline taking benefits of image caching.

If you have any thoughts, please feel free to share them with me! Would love feedback, too!