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How to Develop a Serverless Application with Fission (Part 1)

Write serverless Java functions with JVM (Part 1)
By Ta-Ching Chen |
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Introduction

When users try to develop serverless applications, they often choose to start with Serverless services offered on public clouds, like AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions. However, users may encounter following problems after application development:

  1. Simulating the same environment on local machines is difficult
  2. Vendor lock-in prevents moving applications from one cloud provider to another
  3. Sensitive data that should not be sent outside an on-premises datacenter

Fission is a serverless framework built on top of Kubernetes. Here are some benefits for adopting Fission as serverless solution to develop a severless application:

  • Portability
    • Laptop, PC, On-premises datacenter, even cloud providers. Wherever you can run Kubernetes, you can run Fission.
    • Recreate a serverless application in short time with fission spec files.
  • Support rich event sources
    • HTTP Trigger
    • Message queue trigger: NATS, Kafka
    • Time trigger
  • Rich Environment (Language) supportability
    • NodeJs, Go, Python, Java (JVM languages), Ruby, Perl, PHP7, DotNet, DotNet2, Binary
    • BYOE (Build Your Own Environment)
  • Build automation
    • Builder manager inside Fission helps to create a deployable function package from source code.

After seeing these advantages for adopting Fission as serverless framework, you may feel exciting and start wondering how to create a serverless applciation with Fission. Let’s dive into the concepts of fission first.

Installation

You can install kubernetes and fission by following install guides.

Basic Fission Concepts

Trigger, Function, Environment

There are three basic concepts of fission:

Function:

A snippet of code write in specific programming language and will be invoked when requests come to fission router.

Following is a simple nodejs helloworld sample

module.exports = async function(context) {
    return {
        status: 200,
        body: "Hello, world!\n"
    };
}

Currently, fission support multiple popular language like NodeJs, Go, Python, Java…etc. For more examples in different languages, please visit fission language examples.

Environment

The environment(language) container which runs user function to serve HTTP requests. When a request hit fission router, the env container will load user function into runtime container first, then execute the function to serve the request.

Trigger

A fission object maps incoming requests to the backend functions. When a trigger receives requests/events, it will invoke the target function defined in trigger object by sending a HTTP request to function pod.

Currently, fission supports following types of trigger:

  • HTTP Trigger
    • The trigger first registers a specific url path to router and proxy all requests hit the url to user function.
  • Time trigger
    • A function will be invoked based on the schedule of cron spec.
  • Message Queue Trigger
    • The trigger will subscribe and handle any messages sent to the message queue topic. Then, publish function response/error to the predefined response/error topic.
  • Kubernetes Watch Trigger
    • A watcher will be created to watch changes of kubernetes objects. If any changes occurred, invoke the target user function.

How Function Pod handles HTTP Requests

By default, when a trigger invokes the target function, a HTTP request will be send to the function pod. At this moment a fission component call executor will send specialize requests to function pod(s) to load in user function.

Function pod specialization

A function pod is consist of two containers:

  • fetcher: fetch user function from storage and put it into a shared volume that can read from env container.
  • env: load user function and serve HTTP requests.

Here are steps for how to specialize a function pod:

  1. Executor sends 1st specialize requests to fetcher to fetch user function
  2. Fetcher fetches function from Kubernetes CRD or fission storagesvc
  3. Put function file to shared emptyDir volume. Un-archive function file if its a ZIP file
  4. Executor sends 2nd specialize requests to env to load-in function
  5. Env container search&read function file from shared volume
  6. Once whole specialization process finished, Env container start to serve HTTP requests

Hello World in Golang (Sample)

After explanation of basic fission concepts and how function pod handles requests, let’s start with a simple function first.

Here are some steps to deploy a Golang function:

  1. Create environment
  2. Create function
  3. Create trigger
  4. Check function execution logs

Create environment

Unlike NodeJS and Python, Golang is compile language and need to compile source code into binary before actually running it. From 1.8 Golang added a plugin package, it allows a program to load binary plugin file dynamically.

Luckily, we don’t need to build plugin ourselves cause fission buildermgr build function source code into executable binary automatically once any changes happen to package.

To enable this feature, we have to assign builder image with --builder flag.

$ fission env create --name go --image fission/go-env --builder fission/go-builder

Create function

Here is a hello world example (hw.go) in Golang:

// Due to golang plugin mechanism,
// the package of function handler must be main package
package main

import (
    "net/http"
)

// Handler is the entry point for this fission function
func Handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    msg := "Hello, world!\n"
    w.Write([]byte(msg))
}

You can create & test with commands:

# Create golang env with builder image to build go plugin
$ fission fn create --name helloworld --env go --src hw.go --entrypoint Handler

There are two interesting flags when creating the function: --src and --entrypoint.

  • --src is the source file of a function. Normally, it will be a ZIP file, with Golang env you can use a single file as well.
  • --entrypoint let server know which function to run with. In Go, the value of entrypoint is simply the function name.

When we create a function with --src flag, CLI creates a package contains the file we given as source archive. A fission component call buildermgr will detect change of package CRD and help us to build go source code into a plugin file. Once the build process completed, the final artifact will be saved in storagesvc and buildermgr will update the reference of deploy archive in package for fetcher to download with.

You can check the build status & logs with following commands:

$ fission pkg list
NAME              BUILD_STATUS ENV
hw-go-aazf        succeeded    go

$ fission pkg info --name hw-go-aazf
Name:        hw-go-aazf
Environment: go
Status:      succeeded
Build Logs:
Building file /packages/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip in /usr/src/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip
+ basename /packages/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip
+ srcDir=/usr/src/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip
+ trap rm -rf /usr/src/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip EXIT
+ [ -d /packages/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip ]
+ [ -f /packages/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip ]
+ echo Building file /packages/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip in /usr/src/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip
+ mkdir -p /usr/src/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip
+ cp /packages/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip /usr/src/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip/function.go
+ cd /usr/src/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip
+ go build -buildmode=plugin -i -o /packages/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip-nk71no .
+ rm -rf /usr/src/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip

Once the status change from running to succeeded, we can test function with the built-in test command.

$ fission fn test --name helloworld

NOTE: You may experience long cool start time compare to other language. It was caused by the size of deploy archive.

Create trigger

Now we create a HTTP trigger to listen on the url path /my-first-function with GET HTTP method.

# fission httptrigger create --method <HTTP method> --url <url path> --function <function name>
$ fission httptrigger create --method GET --url "/my-first-function" --function helloworld

Then, you can access the function with url path defined.

$ curl http://${FISSION_ROUTER}/my-first-function

NOTE: For how to set up $FISSION_ROUTER, please visit here

Check function execution logs

Fission provides a easy way to view function logs.

$ fission fn logs -f --name helloworld

Then, the logs of function pod will be printed.

[2018-08-22 11:35:35.505701219 +0000 UTC] Listening on 8888 ...
[2018-08-22 11:35:36.088239423 +0000 UTC] 2018/08/22 11:35:36 Fetcher ready to receive requests
[2018-08-22 11:43:49.838357658 +0000 UTC] 2018/08/22 11:43:49 fetcher received fetch request and started downloading: {1 {hw-go-aazf  default    0 0001-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC <nil> <nil> map[] map[] [] nil [] }   e582f69d-a5fe-11e8-a55e-08002720b796 [] [] false}
[2018-08-22 11:43:53.587107386 +0000 UTC] 2018/08/22 11:43:53 Successfully placed at /userfunc/e582f69d-a5fe-11e8-a55e-08002720b796
[2018-08-22 11:43:53.587132444 +0000 UTC] 2018/08/22 11:43:53 Checking secrets/cfgmaps
[2018-08-22 11:43:53.587146255 +0000 UTC] 2018/08/22 11:43:53 Completed fetch request
[2018-08-22 11:43:53.587203725 +0000 UTC] 2018/08/22 11:43:53 elapsed time in fetch request = 3.752048132s
[2018-08-22 11:43:53.588843964 +0000 UTC] Specializing ...
[2018-08-22 11:43:53.588859882 +0000 UTC] loading plugin from /userfunc/e582f69d-a5fe-11e8-a55e-08002720b796/hw-go-aazf-tzxrip-nk71no
[2018-08-22 11:43:53.59725246 +0000 UTC] Done

Add Additional Go Dependencies

Though we already demonstrate how to create a function with single Go file, we often write a Go application with different dependencies in real world. To support this, here are couple steps to follow with:

  1. Download all necessary dependencies to vendor directory
  2. Archive all go files (include dependencies)
  3. Create function with ZIP file just created

Let’s use vendor-example as demonstration. The structure of vendor-example looks like this

vendor-example/
├── main.go
└── vendor
    └── github.com
        └── ......

You can use popular Go dependency management tool like dep and glide to download all dependencies to vendor directory. Since vendor-example is the root directory of user function, we need to ignore it when archiving function files. Otherwise, the function builder will not be able to find Go files to built with.

$ cd ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/fission/fission/examples/go/vendor-example/

# Only archive the files under vendor-example, 
# otherwise go builder will not be able to build plugin
$ zip -r example.zip .

$ fission fn create --name foobar --env go --src example.zip --entrypoint Handler

$ fission fn test --name foobar

Conclusion

This part we introduce the advantage of adopting fission as serverless framework on kubernetes, basic concept of around fission core and how to create a simple HelloWorld example with fission.

For Part 2 of this post, we will talk about what’s the actual request payload being passed to user function and how to create a guestbook application with fission!

In the meantime, feel free to join the Fission community!

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