Currently there's an issue with Composer which requires Redis [1]. Redis module is not installed by default in the NodeJS images. I see 2 options to unblock this: 1 - include Redis in the default nodeJS runtime [2] 2 - make Redis optional for Composer; parallel combinator in Composer won't work w/o Redis, but we can assume it's the Openwhisk operator's responsibility to provide a default nodeJS image that includes Redis module.
I'm personally slightly more inclined toward option (1) b/c that enables in theory all features that exist in Composer. I'm saying "in theory" b/c the developers still needs to provision Redis on their own, before using parallel combinators; so, since the developers need to do something to enable this feature, we could also assume they could provide a custom runtime that includes Redis, in case the operator doesn't provide it; but with a blackbox action, the system can't optimize the cold-start. The bottom line is that currently, a developer that wants to try OpenWhisk and Composer, by default it won't work; unless at least we implement option (2) . Hence I'm not really sure what's best to do. WDYT ? Thanks, dragos [1] - https://github.com/apache/openwhisk-composer/blob/master/conductor.js#L45 [2] - https://github.com/apache/openwhisk-runtime-nodejs/blob/master/core/nodejs10Action/package.json
