Sky Island

Experimental / ALPHA stage

Sky Island is a FaaS platform built utilizing FreeBSD jails, on ZFS, for running raw Go functions, with interaction through a REST API and inspired by tidwall.

How It Works

A request comes in to run a function. The request contains a git URL to a Go repository containing the function. The request also contains the "call". The call is what will be run including any arguments.

Upon successfully accepting the inbound request, Sky Island will check if there's a binary already for that repo and if so, will move to executing it. If there isn't, Sky Island will check to see if the repo exists. If not, it clones the repo, however if it does, it'll move on to the compile step and generate a "main.go" file and compile a binary in the "build" jail. The "build" jail holds all of the cloned repositories and will be reused on each request unless otherwise told not to. Once a binary is created, an execution jail is created, the binary is copied into it, and executed. The binary's output is returned to the caller via an HTTP response to the original request.

Examples

Simple Call

curl --silent -XPOST http://demo.skyisland.io:3280/api/v1/function -d '{"url": "github.com/mmcloughlin/geohash", "call": "Encode(100.1, 80.9)"}'

Cache Bust Call

curl --silent -XPOST http://demo.skyisland.io:3280/api/v1/function -d '{"url": "github.com/mmcloughlin/geohash", "call": "Encode(100.1, 80.9)", "cache_bust": true}'

Result

{"timestamp":1513717061,"data":"jcc92ytsf8kn"}

Use Cases

• Utilize existing Go code in any application
• Build workflows and pipelines with Sky Island as the execution engine
• Testing
• Low overhead

Requirements

• lib32.txz installed
• ZFS
• Go version >= 1.9
• Make sure that jail_enabled="YES" is present in the "/etc/rc.conf" file

System Initialization

Initialzing the system does a number of things to make running Sky Island easier. Sky Island will check to see if the base system packages and Go tarball have already been downloaded and if they have, they'll use those.

• Create a ZFS dataset to work from
• Download the base package for the version of FreeBSD you have installed
• Extract those packages to the dataset where the base jail will be kept
• Update the base jail with freebsd-update
• Set some basic jail configuration
• Install Go and create a workspace
• Create a ZFS snapshot of the base jail
• Create build jail

This is accomplished by running:

sky-island -c config.json -i

Installation

go install will install the Sky Island binary into the Go bin directory in the GOPATH.

The above can be adequate however for some folks, you might want to have Sky Island controlled through the RC system. An RC script is included as well as a target in the Makefile to install it. make install

VirtualBox Appliance

A VirtualBox appliance is provided via a Packer build here to allow for easier testing.

Running Sky Island

To run Sky Island, run the command below.

sky-island -c config.json

IP Address Management

The Sky Island config file has an IP4 section to configure how it handles jails IP addressing. If a request is received that indicates a jail needs an IP address, Sky Island checks to see if there is an available address and returns one to be assigned to the execution jail. Use the admin API, described below, to manage the IP pool and to see which jail is associated with which IP and visa versa.

The subnet that Sky Island exists on should have DHCP turned off or at a minimum, make sure that the IP pools aren't overlapping.

There will be a future effort to support multiple IP4 pools.

Caching

Sky Island tries it's best to respond to API requests as quickly as possible. To achieve this, a number of caching mechanisms have been implemented for binaries and repositories. Upon receiving a request via the API, Sky Island will check to see if there's an associated binary that's already been compiled. If there is, that artifact is used. If there's no binary, Sky Island checks to see if the repository has been seen before and if so, uses the repo on disk and compiles a binary from there. The binary will be added to the binary cache for later use.

This cache can be busted however by including cache_bust=true in payload of a "function run" POST request. This will force Sky Island to clone the repo and build a new binary.

API

The Sky Island API provides insight into the Sky Island system. The healthcheck endpoint is not protected by header auth however the admin endpoints are. This can be configured by fields in the config.json file by setting the 'admin_api_token' and 'admin_token_header' fields.

Metrics

By default, Sky Island uses StatsD to write out metrics. Jail created/removed counts, request times, etc are reported.

Contact

Brian Downs @bdowns328

License

Sky Island source code is available under the BSD 3 Clause License.