2023-09-08

So I’ve been setting up functions all day as promised. In fact I haven’t stopped trying to fix stupid computer problems all day. Same at work, same at home. I went for a walk to pick up Sophie from the train station, and I walked for five short minutes in the morning which felt nice. In fact as I was walking this morning I just got into the swing of a thought about capitalism or something as I stepped in, over the threshold, and as I did, life started again and the thought left my mind. It was something about whether banning corporate secrets would resolve the free-market dilemma.

I’ve been scammed by open source. The creator of OpenFaas and faasd, wrote a book. The book is called “Serverless for everyone else” and it serves as the only source of documentation for the open-source faasd project. I’ve been considering using faasd for a while now as it seems to solve all my needs. An open source self hosted lambda platform. Great! In fact I thought it was so good, I didn’t mind spending $70 on the PDF documentation as looking at the chapters, it looks like everything I wanted to do was documented in there. I also got the version with the prebuild grafana dashboards, which I thought would be useful. I was wrong. The book, rather than documentation, is a selection of examples on how to do things with faasd. But the more I work with it, the more it seems faasd, isn’t as powerful as I thought, and perhaps is missing some crucial functionality. Or it’s not and there is no real technical documentation. This is the problem. I can’t work out where my issue is or what I have to do, so I’m using trial and error to tweak a docker-compose.yaml (which isn’t actually for docker but faasd’s own subset implementation…) and restart the faasd service using systemctl to see if I can get it working. Now the issue I’m facing is with the grafana set up which could very possibly be due to grafana and weird permissions. But it’s not easy to work this out. Especially considering the book and an add on file have details on what to put in the yaml file (both say to do different things, and it looks like both are wrong). I’m getting the impression that this isn’t the only thing I’ll have wrong with the book but we shall see. Live and learn. Don’t buy stuff from little known open source projects.

I’m going to try and switch off tomorrow morning. Maybe just for half a day.