// the find
openfaas/faas
OpenFaaS - Serverless Functions Made Simple
OpenFaaS is a Kubernetes-native serverless platform that lets you deploy functions as OCI containers, with auto-scaling and a built-in async queue. It abstracts away most of the Kubernetes boilerplate for event-driven workloads. The catch: this repo is the Community Edition, which has a restrictive EULA — commercial use requires a paid license.
The provider abstraction is genuinely well-designed — you can swap the backend (Kubernetes, faasd, etc.) without touching the gateway. NATS integration for async/queued invocations is solid and avoids reinventing message passing. The Prometheus metrics surface is first-class, with Grafana dashboards ready to import. The template store model means adding a new language runtime is a Dockerfile, not a code change.
The EULA is a landmine: internal business use requires a paid license, which disqualifies the OSS version for most real deployments. All the interesting features — multi-tenancy, the new dashboard, advanced autoscaling profiles — are in closed-source Pro repos, so what you see on GitHub is intentionally crippled. The UI is AngularJS 1.8, which is effectively unmaintained and signals how much investment the CE tier actually gets. Cold-start latency is whatever Kubernetes pod scheduling gives you, which can be 5–30 seconds — there's no pre-warming in CE.