Michele, I have that dream as well! In fact, I've set up 3 production deployments of OpenWhisk just last week across three different public cloud providers. I'm deploying another production instance to a private cloud later this week. In my case, I'm deploying OpenWhisk on top of OpenShift (Kubernetes + some extras). Now, I'll admit that I didn't have to install OpenShift on each of these clouds; someone else did that for me. But, once OpenShift is there, I deploy OpenWhisk identically across all 3. Deployment of a new production cluster takes just a couple of minutes. I can use the same OpenShift template (extension to regular Kubernetes yaml files - similar in spirit to Helm Charts) to spin up a massive HA production cluster or a simple temporary development cluster just by tweaking some parameter values in a file.
That's the beauty of Kubernetes, OpenShift, and the like. You can deploy, manage, and monitor applications identically across any cloud provider or even on bare metal servers. I understand if Kubernetes or OpenShift aren't your thing, but these are the enablers of the dream you described. Also, as an aside, CouchDB and Kafka clusters work great in Kubernetes. I've been running HA clusters of each on OpenShift for a while now. If you want more details on that, I'm happy to share since it seems you've had some experiences that didn't turn out as well. We definitely have some work to do in the OpenWhisk project to consolidate and document the Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Mesos deployment options. All the pieces necessary to deploy everything are a bit fragmented and it can be confusing to newcomers just trying to get a production deployment going. But, I'm a big believer in using some kind of container orchestration as the deployment target of the future. Ben On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 1:17 PM, Michele Sciabarra <[email protected]> wrote: > I have a dream: installing easily OpenWhisk , production grade, everywhere. > Most notably, on AWS, but also on Azure, Digital Ocean and even on bare metal. > > I am aware of the Kubernetes deployment. Everyone is using that, I was told > on Slack. > > Well, the fact is that in general installing Kubernetes is hard. And it adds > a substantial burden on the system to run. > > There are installers for Kubernetes on AWS (kops) and more but they add a > good level of complexity to the installation. > > Furthermore, there are Kafka and Couchdb and afaik they do not play so well > with Kubernetes (I worked months deploying Kafka on Kubernetes so I know). > Couchdb looks like to be on the same league, because of some restrictions on > the deployment due to its design based on Erlang. > > In short, I have the feeling that a better solution would be to able to > deploy OpenWhisk using just virtual machines. VIrtual Machine are not going > away and be replaced by Kubernetes in the foreseeable future and AWS is still > more a "virtual machine" than a container based Cloud. > > So I have this idea of creating an installer, based on docker-machine. I try > to call it "wsk-machine". The idea is that wsk-machine would create a cluster > and deploy it easily a multi node, production ready cluster on everything > that docker-machine supports. > > How crazy (and wrong) sonds this idea? Please tell me it is completely wrong > (and why). > > -- > Michele Sciabarra > [email protected]
