In this post, I’ll cover some of the things I’ve worked on since I joined VMware this February. It’s been a busy time between further developing the OpenFaaS project, meeting with the community and getting code shipped.
I’m based in the U.K., so I travelled to the local VMware HQ in Staines (near London) for onboarding. I received a warm welcome and sent a tweet announcing my plans, which generated an incredibly positive reaction from the community.
I’ve already had the chance to present OpenFaaS to my team within the Open Source Technology Center, and have had lots of interest in the project from other VMware Business Units, too.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Started building “Team Serverless” with one team member in the Bulgaria office, with other requisitions coming up in Europe & the U.K.
- Built the first official OpenFaaS workshop using Python for function examples
- Gave the opening keynote at PyCon Slovakia, followed by face-to-face time with Stefan Prodan, a core contributor who helped co-lead a workshop for 15-20 people
- Met with a VMware team who is looking to use Terraform as a function to manage up to 1,500 internal AWS accounts
- Spent time with the open source team behind the Dispatch project who is using OpenFaaS (and other projects) as a basis for their FaaS offering, which will add features like Active Directory support and role-based access control (RBAC) on top
- Made dozens of commits to OpenFaaS as a VMware employee – these come from my regular account but have an additional Signed-off-by line. Here’s an example: https://github.com/openfaas/faas-cli/pull/351/commits/e25d64f0a6e320fc7ccdbade8f55a3110b0454ce
I’ve shipped new releases of the OpenFaaS CLI, UI and back-end components to improve the UX and performance of the system as a whole, and our #FaaSFriday Twitter campaign is more active than ever.
One of the great parts of working full-time on OpenFaaS is knowing that I can structure my time to make an impact where it’s needed. For instance, there was a long-requested feature for the UI to display when a function is downloaded and ready to be used. I was able to put that together, test it and ship it within a couple of days. Our CLI can now take an override for the API Gateway URL via an environmental variable. Several people have already commented on how useful this was to them.
You’ll hear more from me on VMware’s Open Source Blog over the coming months, and I’ll still be publishing new posts to my personal blog, too, at https://blog.alexellis.io.
Interested in contributing? Here are three practical ways you can get involved with the project and community:
- Join the OpenFaaS Slack community: email [email protected] with a short introduction (one sentence is fine)
- Star or Fork the project on GitHub, then check out the contribution guide for some ways to contribute: https://github.com/openfaas/faas. (Note – these don’t have to involve writing code)
- Start the self-paced workshop: https://github.com/openfaas/workshop
Finally, I’ll also be on the road for the following dates if you’d like to meet in person or find out more about OpenFaaS and VMware’s Open Source initiatives:
- 10-11 April: Cisco DevNet Create – Palo Alto, CA
- 2-4 May: KubeCon EU – Copenhagen, Denmark
- 11-12 June: DockerCon US – San Francisco, CA
