OpenLambda

OpenLambda is an Apache-licensed serverless computing project, written (mostly) in Go and based on Linux containers. The primary goal of OpenLambda is to enable exploration of new approaches to serverless computing. Our research agenda is described in more detail in a HotCloud '16 paper.

Build and Test

OpenLambda relies heavily on operations that require root privilege. To simplify this, we suggest that you run all commands as the root user. OpenLambda is only actively tested on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Build and Test

Make sure you have all basic dependencies installed:

apt update
apt install -y docker.io llvm-12-dev libclang-common-12-dev build-essential python3 zlib1g-dev

For a recent version of go, run the following:

wget -q -O /tmp/go.tar.gz https://go.dev/dl/go1.18.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -C /usr/local -xzf /tmp/go.tar.gz
ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/go /usr/bin/go

Further, you need to have a recent nightly version of Rust, the wasm32 toolchain, and the cross tool installed. The easiest way to do this is.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh -s -- -y --default-toolchain=nightly-2022-07-25
source $HOME/.cargo/env
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
rustup target add --toolchain=nightly-2023-02-22 wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo install cross

Finally, add your user to the docker group to enable cross-compilation of native binaries to open-lambda's environment. Do not forget to restart your shell/session afterwards!

sudo gpasswd -a $USER docker

You can build the ol and other resources with just make. Then make sure it passes the tests:

make test-all

Getting Started

You can create a new OL environment with the following comment:

./ol worker init

This creates a directory named default-ol with various OL resources. You can create an OL environment at another location by passing a -path=DIRNAME to the init command.

Default config settings were saved to ./default-ol/config.json. Modify them if you wish, then start an OL worker (if you used -path above, use it again with the worker command):

./ol worker up

In another terminal, make sure the worker is running with ./ol worker status.

Now save the following to ./default-ol/registry/echo.py:

def f(event):
    return event

Now invoke your lambda (the result should be the same as the POST body):

curl -X POST localhost:5000/run/echo -d '{"hello": "world"}'

When you're done, just kill the worker with ctrl-C. If you want to run the worker in detached mode (i.e., in the background), just start it again with the -d flag:

./ol worker up -d

You can shutdown a detached worker like this:

./ol worker down

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.