A few days ago I wasn’t feeling well ~ couldn’t focus on some day-to-day stuff. Gave my brain a rest ~ let it do what it wanted to do for a bit.

A couple of days screaming into the void and issuing fatwas against some ever-cheery and trendy tech youtubers who think you can do anything on a pi, I suddenly have microk8s running on a capable desktop with a few dockerized work items and a few “functions” offloaded from some monolithic processes to openfaas.

WTF, Brain?!? WTF…

If you ever start to think you’ve got installing, configuring, and O&M of these self-hosted services down, … yeah.

OTOH, if you ever want a sharp lesson to make you go back and understand how all those self-hosted things are built and deployed on small scale, … also yeah. :-p

Trying to describe my thinking to someone: “You know what it really needs? It needs a smaller server off to the side – a bolt-on where you can offload longer running processes, complex integrations, and async calls.” I thought some motorcycle imagery captured it best – a “sidecar.” Turns out other people were clever well before me X-)

Anyway, kubernetes, “serverless,” … Some of it has me thinking back to AppleScript and Automator, big pushes to have monolithic product makers expose key functions from their intellectual property as scriptable, drag & drop functions that the end user could strap into their own workflows. After that, “Service-Oriented Architectures,” “The Cloud,”, “*aaS” (for arbitrary values of *), … It never gets old, I guess.

Tonight I took a process out of a workflow and replaced it with an API call to the same code reworked as a FaaS. It gets hit a lot by different events, so why not? Take the “function,” template it for the openfaas platform, dockerize it and push it to microk8s private container registry, spit out the yaml descriptions and deployment instructions, and we’re good to go! … except it was failing sometimes. Let’s try upping its availability with some replication… Better. Except now those are just sitting there idle at off hours. Auto-scaling – right! Let’s read up on that… Now I have some somewhat heavy pieces of code spinning up just to make that API call… Wouldn’t it be better to just have that piece of code just run right then and there without the API call? Exactly when it’s needed? Not keeping anything idle in between? X-)

Whatever, friends. I know there are uses, sure. And it’ll probably look good on a resume someday. Most importantly though? Brain / gut thought it was important, and there’s not much arguing with them.

We’ll see where it leads.