Quicklink | A serverless appliance for your Raspberry Pi with faasd :: Johan Siebens
I try to keep up with all the buzz words on the internet just so I know what they mean and have a good idea of what’s going on out there in the digital world. While I’m not a coder I am a professional dabbler and with things as cheap as the raspberry pi 4 these days with lots of memory and a reasonable spec for not much cash it’s hard not to want to play with this stuff and FIND a reason to actually use it rather than the other way around of having an actual use and then making it fit ;) — typical way I go about stuff.
Most people will probably know about AWS Lambda, Google Cloud and others in terms of these methods of ‘serverless’ computing runtimes. I understand it a little bit and now that I see it framed as ‘Function as a Service’ (Faas) and with the title ‘Immutable Infrastructure’ it makes it more logical in my tiny brain.
image from A serverless appliance for your Raspberry Pi with faasd :: Johan Siebens — originally from unsplash.
I get overwhelmed these days with platforms and frameworks but what I do know from being a blogger on graphene based immutable blockchains in the last three years is that it makes sense to look at decentralised infrastructure to build out projects — doing so in the cloud from those providers above can be expensive so to see open source versions that work with raspberry pi 4 is cool that you can effectively make your own.
Then what makes it extra cool is the whole container movement right with docker swarm and Kubernetes which not only is like virtual machines for the web but their are loads of existing code bases for scaling little mini clusters of these cheap raspberry pi’s to be active workers — kinda cool to not have the overheads of the cloud and run it local and get something going before needing to maybe get the scaling and backhaul of the big boys, feels like a great place to learn.
The quick link guide above gives you a great walk through for setting up your own open source FaaS with the help of something called faasd — it’s a single binary, lightweight and is ready for deployment on raspberry pi, I’m gonna be stepping through this guide just to learn how these things work.
This company hashicorp keeps popping up on my radar too, not only do they have a cool name but I feel like it’s one of those companies that’s just gonna get acquired by someone much bigger in the very near future, sometimes when you’ve been around the internet for long enough you can just read the internet tealeaves.
Another thing I’ve been wanting play with (like actually find a reason to play with it) is inlets and it’s got a pro version if you want encryption/tls with it. I think for someone doing experiments and running a local server setup like this to play with being able to like tunnel in to home from an iPad Pro for instance is an attractive proposition.
I’m not totally sure after I’d done all the config what I’d use something like this for but maybe something to do with blockchain regarding a custom condenser frontend, maybe I could use it to query the blockchain or maybe learn about hive mind a little more so that I can access/call data queries and populate them into other frameworks.
I’ve got a little dream floating around that I’d use 11ty as a frontend and then pull in a variety of things via api calls/templates at runtime but I’ve just not worked that out yet if that’s possible, whatever I do thou I want to make it static and fast, easy to use, easy to update, I don’t want to add more complexity to it.
Anyway, that’s me and my blurtech post for the day, what are you playing with at the moment, what’s tickling your creative and digital fancy on this meerkat wednesday?
meerkat wednesday is when we look back at the days of the week before and then days of the week to come, it’s a perfect mid way anchor point to either catchup, slowdown and recalibrate, have a great day!
