Fission

Fission is a fast serverless framework for Kubernetes with a focus on developer productivity and high performance.

It's customizable (with sensible defaults), extensible to any language, and interoperates well with other infrastructure.

See http://fission.io for more.

Running Fission

Setup Kubernetes

You can install Kubernetes on your laptop with minikube: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube

Or, you can use Google Container Engine's free trial to get a 3 node cluster.

Verify access to the cluster

  $ kubectl version

Get and Run Fission

If you're using GKE, use the fission.yaml unmodified. If you're using minikube, change all instances of LoadBalancer services to NodePort.

  $ curl http://fission.io/fission.yaml | kubectl create -f -

  $ kubectl --namespace fission get services

Save the external IP addresses of controller and router services in FISSION_URL and FISSION_ROUTER, respectively. FISSION_URL is used by the fission CLI to find the server. (FISSION_ROUTER is only needed for the examples below to work.)

Install the client CLI

  $ curl http://fission.io/fission > fission

  $ chmod +x fission

  $ sudo mv fission /usr/local/bin/

Run an example

  $ fission env create --name nodejs --image fission/node-env
  
  $ echo 'module.exports = function(context, callback) { callback(200, "Hello, world!\n"); }' > hello.js  

  $ fission function create --name hello --env nodejs --code hello.js
  
  $ fission route create --method GET --url /hello --function hello
  
  $ curl http://$FISSION_ROUTER/hello
  Hello, world!

Compiling Fission

You'll need go installed, along with the glide dependecy management tool. You'll also need docker for building images.

The server side is compiled as one binary ("fission-bundle") which contains controller, poolmgr and router; it invokes the right one based on command-line arguments.

To build fission-bundle: clone this repo, then from the top level directory:

  # Get dependencies
  $ glide install

  # Build fission server and an image
  $ pushd fission-bundle
  $ ./build.sh

  # Edit push.sh to point to your registry
  $ $EDITOR push.sh
  $ ./push.sh
  $ popd

  # To install, update fission.yaml to point to your compiled image
  $ $EDITOR fission.yaml
  $ kubectl create -f fission.yaml

If you're changing the CLI:

  # Build Fission CLI
  $ cd fission-cli && go install

Status

Fission is in early alpha. Don't use it in production just yet, but play with it and give us feedback!

Performance

The alpha release has focussed on cold-start latency performance. For requests that don't have a running instance, i.e. a "cold start", fission has a latency overhead of less than 100 msec for the NodeJS environment.