Combining Node-RED and Openwhisk for Pattern-based Development and Execution of Complex FaaS Workflows
The CCGrid symposium series serves as a major international forum for presenting and sharing recent research accomplishments and technological developments in the field of Cluster, Cloud and Internet computing. CCGrid 2022 is the 22nd edition of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Cluster, Cloud and Internet computing, took place from 16-19 May 2022. EU Day, organised by HUB4CLOUD, explores the major developments in the European cloud computing ecosystem, in particular open source approaches. The presentation was held by Prof. George Kousiouris, Harokopio University of Athens.
Proposal
Modern cloud computing advances have been pressing application modernization in the last 15 years, stressing the need for application redesign towards the use of more distributed and ephemeral resources. From the initial IaaS and PaaS approaches to microservices and now to the serverless model (and especially the Function as a Service approach), new challenges arise constantly for application developers. This tutorial presents a design and
development environment coming from the H2020 PHYSICS project, that aims to ease application evolution and migration to the new FaaS model, based on the widely used Node-RED open source tool. The goal of the environment is to enable a more user friendly and abstract function and workflow creation for complex FaaS applications. To this end, it bypasses workflow description and function reuse limitations of the current FaaS platforms, by providing an extendable, pattern-enriched palette of ready-made, reusable functionality that can be combined in arbitrary ways. The environment embeds seamless DevOps processes for generating the deployable artefacts (i.e. functions and images) of the FaaS platform (Openwhisk). Annotation mechanisms are also available for the developer to dictate diverse execution options or management guidelines towards the deployment and operation stacks. Indicative scenarios of usage will be demonstrated, including creating, registering and executing functions and flows based on the Node-RED runtime, parallelizing a workload, collecting data at the edge and creating function orchestrators to accompany the application. The target FaaS platform in this case is another popular open source solution, Openwhisk.
Overall process: PHYSICS Design Environment
❖Local Control UI environment
❖Embeds Node-RED container with PHYSICS provided nodes and subflows
❖Flow management and Build process linked to the cloud based backend
❖Creates the deployable artefacts (docker function images)
❖Log collector from the various stages of the process
❖Registration of the final function in the target OW environment
Three ways of using Node-RED
Function editor and deployer to the OW case
❖OW execution- OW orchestration
❖Applies to sequences only
❖Function execution runtime
❖All functions embedded inside a NR container that is executed as a function (NR-NR)
❖Combination of inner NR functions execution and choreography of external available OW actions (OW-NR)
❖NR flow (executed as service or function)
❖Invokes any other type of action
ETL Data Collection Abstraction
CONFERENCE WEBSITE: https://fcrlab.unime.it/ccgrid22/
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