Supporting storage types on open-source platforms

[mcopik]

Currently, we use Minio deployment on open-source platforms like OpenWhisk. While this works well for local deployments, users also want to deploy Kubernetes-based FaaS platforms to the cloud. There, we need to support both the remote Minio deployment and the use of support using cloud-native storage like S3 or Blob Storage.

Solution

Functions deployed to platforms like OpenWhisk, Fission, and Knative should be able to use a configurable storage type. Depending on the type, we select the wrappers that have to be added and configure environment variables in a function to access the storage correctly.

Challenges and implementation steps:

• We should have an additional configuration section in JSON and/or CLI switch "--storage ".
• Storage type should be cached as a part of the function. Changing the storage type requires redeployment to update wrappers and environment variables.
• Users provide the configuration to access the storage, like the address of Minio and access keys or Azure resource group. Alternatively, we deploy it on-the-fly - except for Minio, which needs to be deployed earlier.