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Show HN: Serverless for Everyone Else – eBook

16 points by alexellisuk 6y ago

alexellisuk 6y ago
I've just put up the first edition of my eBook "Serverless for everyone else".. it's the official hands-on guide for "faasd". faasd is a minimalist approach to serverless functions that retains the benefits of cloud and containers. Within a few minutes you'll be deploying your own endpoints with TLS enabled. Just write a few lines of code and deploy from your laptop or your favourite CI/CD solution. Best of all, you can run it on a 5USD VM or even a Raspberry Pi. This is what a couple of people have said that tried it already: "Only been playing with it for a day now, but really amazing bit of kit...makes me wonder why not everyone is talking about it. It is to faas, as sqlite is to MySQL . You get 90% of the power, at 0.5% of the overhead" - Nic Grobler "Once you have deployed faasd, it's one command to push your function into production. From there it's up to you what you like to build. It builds the container, publishes, and deploys your function code ready-to-use in seconds." - Peter Thaleikis Hope you like it and happy to answer questions on Twitter/Slack for folk who are working through the labs and examples.
mrmrcoleman 6y ago
I've always been impressed by how much you focus on developer experience for your projects Alex. Bravo! Could you say more about why you decided to make this and your experience using Gumroad?
- alexellisuk 6y ago
  Hi Mark, this book is based upon faasd - probably the easiest and cheapest way to self-host functions whilst still being able to get the usual things like metrics, queueing (async) and most of the features of OpenFaaS. I wrote this guide because the audience for faasd isn't the same person that builds their own Kubernetes clusters at work, and runs them with a team of 10 SREs. It's for folks who want to stand up a few endpoints quickly and integrate and automate their workflows. Scrape webpages, generate social banners, filter Tweets using code instead of the crappy rules on IFTTT. Build an Alexa skill or home assistant in their home network on a Raspberry Pi. Scraping with faasd is much faster than Lambda - I wrote a blog post on that, and also much easier to deploy. It's worth trying both to compare. I've used Gumroad in the past to sell OpenFaaS merchandise, and I have to say print-on-demand integrates much better with Shopify. Gumroad does excel at collecting the right amount of taxes on eBooks - which Shopify cannot do, so this is one of the reasons for picking them. There's also a lot of Indie Hacker types who have had success self-publishing on Gumroad, so I thought I'd put my first ebook up there. With this first edition there's 44-pages of labs, advice and experience that you cannot get in the openfaas/faasd docs, and I want to see if I can generate value for users that way. It's a bit of a test for market fit. Alex
  - mrmrcoleman 6y ago
    Thanks for the thorough answer Alex. I look forward to reading and hope this experiment works out.
    - alexellisuk 6y ago
      eBooks are relatively new to me - especially the tactics used by Indie Hackers to package and promote them. I'm learning a lot about that, but technical writing and tutorials is my forte. I hope I can bridge the gap and start giving more value to users, and support my open source work at the same time. It's only a couple of hours in and I've seen a sale on every tier offered!

16 points by alexellisuk 6y ago

I've just put up the first edition of my eBook "Serverless for everyone else".. it's the official hands-on guide for "faasd". faasd is a minimalist approach to serverless functions that retains the benefits of cloud and containers. Within a few minutes you'll be deploying your own endpoints with TLS enabled. Just write a few lines of code and deploy from your laptop or your favourite CI/CD solution. Best of all, you can run it on a 5USD VM or even a Raspberry Pi. This is what a couple of people have said that tried it already: "Only been playing with it for a day now, but really amazing bit of kit...makes me wonder why not everyone is talking about it. It is to faas, as sqlite is to MySQL . You get 90% of the power, at 0.5% of the overhead" - Nic Grobler "Once you have deployed faasd, it's one command to push your function into production. From there it's up to you what you like to build. It builds the container, publishes, and deploys your function code ready-to-use in seconds." - Peter Thaleikis Hope you like it and happy to answer questions on Twitter/Slack for folk who are working through the labs and examples.

mrmrcoleman 6y ago

I've always been impressed by how much you focus on developer experience for your projects Alex. Bravo! Could you say more about why you decided to make this and your experience using Gumroad?

alexellisuk 6y ago
Hi Mark, this book is based upon faasd - probably the easiest and cheapest way to self-host functions whilst still being able to get the usual things like metrics, queueing (async) and most of the features of OpenFaaS. I wrote this guide because the audience for faasd isn't the same person that builds their own Kubernetes clusters at work, and runs them with a team of 10 SREs. It's for folks who want to stand up a few endpoints quickly and integrate and automate their workflows. Scrape webpages, generate social banners, filter Tweets using code instead of the crappy rules on IFTTT. Build an Alexa skill or home assistant in their home network on a Raspberry Pi. Scraping with faasd is much faster than Lambda - I wrote a blog post on that, and also much easier to deploy. It's worth trying both to compare. I've used Gumroad in the past to sell OpenFaaS merchandise, and I have to say print-on-demand integrates much better with Shopify. Gumroad does excel at collecting the right amount of taxes on eBooks - which Shopify cannot do, so this is one of the reasons for picking them. There's also a lot of Indie Hacker types who have had success self-publishing on Gumroad, so I thought I'd put my first ebook up there. With this first edition there's 44-pages of labs, advice and experience that you cannot get in the openfaas/faasd docs, and I want to see if I can generate value for users that way. It's a bit of a test for market fit. Alex
- mrmrcoleman 6y ago
  Thanks for the thorough answer Alex. I look forward to reading and hope this experiment works out.
  - alexellisuk 6y ago
    eBooks are relatively new to me - especially the tactics used by Indie Hackers to package and promote them. I'm learning a lot about that, but technical writing and tutorials is my forte. I hope I can bridge the gap and start giving more value to users, and support my open source work at the same time. It's only a couple of hours in and I've seen a sale on every tier offered!