Tutorials on Fission

Running GPU based Functions on Fission

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:34 +0530

With new advancements in AI, more people want to use GPU-based functions in serverless environments. Fission is a serverless framework that you can easily deploy on your Kubernetes clusters.

Fission helps users run their models for different tasks, such as image processing, video processing, and natural language processing. Sometimes, you need special accelerators like GPUs to run these functions effectively. In this guide, we will show you how to set up a GPU-enabled Fission environment and use it to run your GPU-based functions.

Building a Serverless URL Shortener with MongoDB Atlas and Fission

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 09:30:34 +0530

A few weeks ago, I delivered a talk on Demystifying Serverless at the MongDB meetup here in Hyderabad. As part of the talk, I also showed a hands-on demo of using Fission with MongoDB Atlas. In this blog post, I’ll talk about building a serverless URL shortener using MongoDB Atlas and Fission serverless framework.

URL Shortener with MongoDB Atlas and Fission

We will create a URL Shortener application using Fission functions. It will have two functions, one for the frontend and the other for the backend to shorten the URL & communicate with MongoDB Atlas.

Fission Function Orchestration with Argo Workflows

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 12:22:07 +0530

Fission Functions allow user to perform one logical task. To group multiple task together such as one function is dependent on other we can use Argo Workflows.

Argo Workflows is an open source container-native workflow engine with a feature to create DAGs i.e. running task sequentially, in parallel and with dependencies. We will try to develop a simple Insurance Eligibility program which will take different input and calculate insurance installment on basis of the inputs.

Virus scan MinIO buckets using ClamAV, Fission and Kafka

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 09:30:34 +0530

All organizations want to protect their systems and have a good strategy in order to stay away from malware or other potential threats. Before introducing files and binaries into your system organization is very important to scan them and respond immediately based on a predefined strategy.

About Fission

Fission is an open-source and Kubernetes-native serverless framework that lets developers to run code functions easily. Kubernetes has powerful orchestration capabilities to manage and schedule containers while Fission takes advantage of them, being flexible. In other words, Fission can focus on developing the function-as-a-service (FaaS) features.

Autoscaling Serverless Functions with Custom Metrics

Wed, 11 May 2022 14:43:46 +0530

Autoscaling is one of the key features of Kubernetes because of its capability to scale up or down according to the load. This is pretty useful as optimizes cost with minimum human intervention. Autoscaling adjusts your applications and resources based on the rise and fall in the demand.

In the earlier versions of Fission, new deploy functions depended only on targetCPU metric for scaling. But what if you want the functions to scale based on some third party software’s metrics?

Fission Serverless Function + Zapier Webhook - Automate your workflows

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 11:35:34 +0530

There hasn’t been a greater need for automation than what it is today. Things around us are moving fast and everyone wants things done faster. Getting that agility manually is tough and hence individuals and teams globally look for ways to automate workflows.

In this post, I’m going to show you how you can automate your workflows using Fission serverless functions and Zapier Webhooks.

What is Zapier?

Zapier is one of the world’s most widely used tools to automate workflows. It allows you to integrate various apps that you use and integrate them along with actions to complete a flow.

Developing a Serverless Twitter Bot on Fission

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 11:30:34 +0530

Social Media can be extremely overwhelming whilst being useful. Twitter of all is one of the most hyperactive social media platforms. If you are an enterprise, most likely you’ll have tons of tweets and DMs to reply to. While there are off the shelf tools available to help you do that, there’s always some missing functionality.

So why not develop a solution on your own? In today’ post I’ll show you how to develop a serverless Twitter Bot running on Fission. The simple application will show you how to use Twitter API and deploy the bot as a serverless function in Fission on your Kubernetes cluster.

Guestbook Application With Fission and CockroachDB

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:30:34 +0530

Fission provides you with a serverless framework that you can deploy on your Kubernetes clusters. There are various use cases where you can use Fission, and today we’ll show you how to develop a guestbook application with Fission in Go using CockroachDB as a database.

Serverless Guestbook Application

The guestbook is composed with four REST APIs and each API consist of a function and an HTTP trigger.
This application allows a user to create, edit and delete a message. You can submit a message, retrieve a list of messages, delete a message all by means of REST APIs. You can clone Fission REST API Repo and follow the guide to install/try guestbook sample.

Observability with OpenTelemetry & Datadog in Fission

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 06:30:34 +0530

Software development isn’t just about writing a piece of code and running it. There are a lot of other processes around it that ensure that your code is going to work as expected in the real world. Amongst all such practices, Observability is going to be our point of discussion today.

Observability is all about gaining greater control and visibility over your application. It actually tells you what is really happening in your application. With most of the applications today adopting a microservices-oriented architecture, the applications have become complex with a lot of moving parts. And hence observability is a key to build a robust and reliable system. Logs, Metrics and Trace are the 3 pillars of observability. While logs and metrics are very helpful, trace allows you to traverse the entire journey of a request.

How to use PostgreSQL database with Fission functions

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 11:30:34 +0530

How to use PostgreSQL database with Fission functions

In today’s blog post we will see how we can use Fission functions to connect to a PostgreSQL database and perform basic operations on it. By the end of this blog post, you would have learnt how to use PostgreSQL database with Fission functions.

Voting App using Fission functions with PostgreSQL Database

We will create a basic voting application that allows users to vote for an option and view the results. This application is written in Python and uses PostgreSQL database to store the results.

Serverless Next.js Example Blog with Fission

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 13:29:16 +0530

What is Next.js?

Next.js is a framework for building fast, modern websites using React. Next.js provides a couple of features for building static and server-side rendered websites. With Next.js examples and showcase, you can get a taste of Next.js. You can refer to the Next.js documentation for more details.

Next.js Example Blog with Fission

Next.js is gaining a lot of popularity in serverless world. Fission can be used to host a low traffic frontend website, with minimal cost and reduced maintenance. Fission can host your existing Next.js application with few modifications.

Serverless Kafka Consumer for Confluent Cloud

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 11:21:01 +0530

Confluent Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-native service for Apache Kafka. Managed Kafka offering helps you focus on connecting and processing data, anywhere you need it. You avoid hassle of infrastructure management.

In this blog post, we will connect with Kafka cluster hosted in Confluent Cloud using Fission Keda Kafka Connector with SASL SSL. Using Kafka Connector, we receive the latest messages on our desired Kafka topics and process them with Fission functions.

Kubernetes Response Engine: Falcosidekick + Fission

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This blog was originally published on Falco website.

This blog post is part of a series of articles about how to create a Kubernetes response engine with Falco, Falcosidekick and a FaaS. The earlier posts in this series, show how to use Kubeless, Argo, Knative, and others to trigger a resource after getting input from Falcosidekick.

Recently, Falcosidekick received a new output type support for Fission.

In this blog post, we will cover using Falcosidekick and Fission to detect and delete a compromised pod in a Kubernetes cluster. We will briefly talk about Fission in this blog, however, you can check the complete documentation here.

Fission WebSocket Sample

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 10:50:51 +0530

Introduction

In this post we will look into how we can develop a simple a web socket based chat application using Fission functions. Fission’s NodeJS environment now has built in support for WebSocket. So, we are going to use this environment to power our simple web based chat application.

Let’s first understand how this is going to work.

We start by creating a NodeJS environment using the fission/nodejs-env Docker image.
Then we create a fission function for with broadcast.js. It is this piece of code that will broadcast a message to all connected clients.
Next, we will create an HTTP trigger for the above created function.
We then update our chat application to connect over the route, we just created.
We will also create a function to host the this chat application.
As you send a message from one chat window, the function will be triggered and the message will be broadcasted to all connected clients.

We will cover two approaches using which you can test this setup.

Headless Chrome with Puppeteer in a function

Sun, 09 May 2021 23:50:51 +0530

Introduction

Running chrome headless is useful for various test automation tasks but running a headless Chrome in Docker can be tricky (More details here). Also the this Github issue has some good insights on the issues you might face. This blog shows running headless chrome in a fission function. You can find the working example with code etc. in examples repo here.

Typical use cases for which Puppeteer is used are:

Generating screenshots of specific web pages
Automating form submission at scale or doing any testing of web pages
Testing of chrome extensions
Crawl web pages to gather information from them.

Demo

If you simply want to get a sense of running function run, assuming you have Fission installed, you can run fission spec apply and then then test the function

Penetration testing with Gobuster & Fission

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 15:57:51 +0530

Introduction

Gobuster is a tool for bruteforcing websites Directory/File, DNS and VHost written in Go. It enables penetration testing and and brute forcing for hackers and testers. In this tutorial we will use Gobuster with Fission’s binary environment to run it for specific sites and for specific patterns listed in a text file. Fission allows the teams doing penetration testing to focus on code and execution rather than understanding all things around infrastructure.

Using gVisor with Fission

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 18:09:02 +0530

Introduction

Have you ever run into a scenario where you had to run untrusted code? Containers are great from a performance perspective but they have a considerable access to the kernel which can be exploited. In order to have the security of VMs and speed of containers, projects like gVisor and kata containers have risen. In this post, we’ll take a look at gVisor provides an application kernel for containers. It provides a runtime which can be used by Kubernetes. To understand more about how gVisor provides security, please go through this.

Monitoring Fission logs with Grafana Loki

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 16:19:12 +0530

Importance of Logs

Proper logging in a software is a quick and systematic way to inform the state of the software. Although the definition of ’logs’ remains the same along years in software engineering, the scope of what logs are used is has always been increasing. Apart from helping developers and operators, logs can be used by complimenting software for security, metrics, triggers, cost estimation and other different operations.

Logs in Fission

Fission works in a systematic way where there are different services (containers) providing functionalities for running applications (Functions) in a serverless way. Logs in Fission thus comprise of log statements from these services as well as from the applications.

Event Driven Scaling Fission Function Using KEDA

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 18:09:02 +0530

Introduction

Events and integrations with event sources such as message queues are an important part of running functions. Fission had the MQ integration for invoking functions and this integration was available for Kafka, NATS, and Azure Queue Storage. This integration had a few limitations:

For every new integration you want to enable - there was one pod running for enabling the integration
Autoscaling of the trigger handler was not available.
Lastly - one Fission installation could connect to and handle only one instance of a MQ. So for example you could only connect to one Kafka instance in a given Fission installation.

When we decided to build out these features we came across KEDA project and it solved most of the limitations which Fission had in the event integration area. Let’s dive into how it works!

New! Fission GitHub Action: Easily Automate Your CI/CD Workflows

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 18:30:53 +0530

Introduction

GitHub recently launched GitHub Actions which enable developers to develop workflows and execute them based on events in code repositories such as a push event or an issue creation.

There are many Actions available on the Github marketplace which you can use for automating various tasks and workflows around development and deployment. In this tutorial we will use the recently launched Fission Action and build a simple workflow that deploys a Fission function to a Kubernetes cluster.

Monitor Fission serverless functions with OpenTracing

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:42:30 +0530

Introduction

As the number of functions and their usage grows, it is crucial to monitor and manage them effectively. Fission already supports logs on CLI as well integration with external systems using Fluentd. Fission also has monitoring enabled using Prometheus and provides a great way to measure and track your functions automatically.

Serverless functions can be part of a larger distributed system. For example, in the case of serverless applications that become more complex - spanning multiple functions, or in Microservices where functions are triggered between different services that talk to each other to process a single request or perform a business function.

Automated Canary Deployments in Fission

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 01:02:00 +0000

Canary Deployments are a time-tested deployment strategy to reduce risk. The fundamental idea is that deploying software into a production cluster is different from releasing it to its users. With canary deployments, you deploy both old and new versions into a production environment, but send only a small percentage of traffic to the newer version. That way, if the new version fails, only a few users are affected rather than the application’s entire user base. If the newer version works well, the traffic proportion being sent to it is increased incrementally until the new version has been rolled out to all live traffic.

Fission Kafka Sample

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 22:50:51 +0530

Introduction

The open-source Apache Kafka is one of the most popular distributed Stream Processing platforms used for building real time streaming data pipelines and applications. To learn more about Kafka visit the Kafka documentation.

Most serverless functions are triggered by an event, and these in turn may trigger consequent events, which could invoke further functions. This makes Kafka - which acts as a event broker - a natural companion to a Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform such as Fission.

Writing Serverless Functions for JVM with Fission.io

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 22:26:41 +0530

Introduction

The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is one of the most popular application frameworks, particularly when it comes to enterprise software development - due to the maturity of JVM, the breadth of integrated developer tools and the vibrant community, and the extension of JVM to additional languages.

The historic data from TIOBE index also shows how popular JVM and Java have been through the years. In the last decade or so Scala and data-related technologies have made great progress using JVM as the base framework. Most recently Kotlin has seen great progress and also got blessings of Google as an official language for Android development.

FaaS Function Composition with Fission Workflows and NATS

Thu, 22 Mar 2018 01:46:30 -0700

NATS is a lightweight, open source, high-performance, messaging system for cloud native applications, IOT messaging, and microservices architectures. The NATS messaging system implements a scalable publish-subscribe (or pub/sub) distribution model. There are a number of open source technologies like Kafka, and several cloud technologies such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Azure Service Bus that adopt this model as well.

In light of NATS recently being accepted into The Cloud Native Computing Foundation last week, we thought it’d be cool to share how Fission functions and workflows utilize this sleek messaging system on top of Kubernetes.

Hello World: Creating Functions using Fission (in Golang)

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 11:13:45 -0800

First, What is Serverless?

In the last blog post Kubernetes for Newbies, we went over how to get an application up and running on Kubernetes. Though Kubernetes is surely a hot topic in tech, the “serverless” space has become just as (if not even more) trendy. Why is serverless so popular in the dev community?

Turns out, serverless is a developer’s saving grace when it comes to managing servers. Instead of managing a bunch of servers, Serverless solutions allow developers to … well … not manage servers at all! Serverless completely takes away the burden of managing servers. One could say that Serverless separates the “ops” from devs. Functions as a Service (FaaS) enable developers to deploy parts of an application on an “as needed” basis using short-lived functions in just about any programming language.

Hello World in Go for Kubernetes Newbies

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 13:52:34 -0800

Over the past 3 or so years, it seems the term “containerization” and the name “Kubernetes” have been amplified throughout the tech community non-stop. Even with that being so, as a developer, it can be easy to shy away from Kubernetes as its learning curve is notorious for being a steep one. But everyone’s gotta start somewhere, right? This tutorial will give you a basic overview of some of main features of Kubernetes, while walking you through the process of running a simple HelloWorld Golang application locally on your machine to running it on Kubernetes.