Blog post: A serverless appliance for your Raspberry Pi with faasd

This repository contains Packer templates and scripts to build a Raspbian image with faasd and inlets PRO pre-installed.

faasd is the same OpenFaaS experience and ecosystem, but without Kubernetes. Functions and microservices can be deployed anywhere with reduced overheads whilst retaining the portability of containers and cloud-native tooling such as containerd and CNI.

The installation took inspiration from the blog of Alex Ellis, which explains how to install faasd on a Raspberry Pi in more detail.

Beside containerd, faasd and inlets, also cloud-init is available to initialize and configure a Raspian instance. With cloud-init you can customize e.g. hostname, authorized ssh keys, a static ip, basic auth for faasd, ...

This setup includes the following images:

• rpi-faasd: a Raspios/Ubuntu image with containerd and faasd as systemd services, to run a private faasd instance.

1. Download the image of the latest release or build the image.

2. Flash the image to an SD card.

3. Optionally customize the /boot/user-data with e.g. authorized ssh keys, basic auth credentials ...

4. Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi and power it up.

5. As soon the services are up and running, you can access OpenFaas on http://<your raspberry pi ip>:8080. The required basic auth credentials are available in /var/lib/faasd/secrets/ on your Raspberry Pi

To expose the faasd gateway running on a Raspberry Pi, you need to create an exit-node with a public ip. I find the use of inletsctl to easist way to achieve this. Download the latest release or simply install it by running curl -sSLf https://inletsctl.inlets.dev | sudo sh

Next, create an HTTP exit-node on your favourite cloud provider, e.g. on DigitalOcean:

inletsctl create  \
  --tcp=false \   
  --provider digitalocean \   
  --access-token-file ~/access-token.txt \   
  --region lon1 \
  --letsencrypt-domain <your domain>
  --letsencrypt-email <your email>

After writing the rpi-faasd image to an SD card, configure your instance with the proper values for the required environment variables. (See examples/user-data-inlets)

This project includes a Vagrant file and some scripts to build the images in an isolated environment.

To use the Vagrant environment, start by cloning this repository:

git clone https://github.com/jsiebens/rpi-faasd
cd rpi-faasd

Next, start the Vagrant box and ssh into it:

vagrant up
vagrant ssh

When connected with the Vagrant box, run build.sh in the /vagrant directory:

cd /vagrant
./build.sh