SlimFaas: Lightweight Functions on Kubernetes
Shriira Press
A featherweight Function-as-a-Service for Kubernetes that turns ordinary deployments into scale-to-zero functions — no heavy infrastructure required.
Welcome to SlimFaas: Lightweight Functions on Kubernetes.
SlimFaas is a Function-as-a-Service platform that takes a deliberately minimal approach. Instead of asking you to rewrite your code, package it as special function artifacts, or stand up a message broker and a sprawl of controllers, SlimFaas sits in front of the deployments you already run and gives them serverless behaviour through a handful of pod annotations. A function is just a deployment that SlimFaas knows how to scale to zero when idle, wake on demand, route traffic to, and invoke either synchronously or through a durable asynchronous queue. This book follows that idea from the ground up: it opens with the problem SlimFaas solves and the philosophy of staying slim, then works through the HTTP proxy and its request flow, the annotations that turn a deployment into a function, the scaling engine that drives replicas between zero and many, asynchronous invocation with retries and one-off jobs, the built-in Raft-backed state store and internal workers, and finally how to run, observe, and place SlimFaas within the wider cloud-native landscape. Throughout, the goal is a working mental model you can deploy with confidence.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press