Announcing Project Picasso – OpenStack Functions as a Service

We are pleased to announce a new project to enable Functions as a Service (FaaS) on OpenStack — Picasso.

The mission is to provide an API for running FaaS on OpenStack, abstracting away the infrastructure layer while enabling simplicity, efficiency, and scalability for both developers and operators.

Picasso can be used to trigger functions from OpenStack services, such as Telemetry (via HTTP callback) or Swift notifications. This means no long running applications, as functions are only executed when called.

Picasso is comprised of two main components:

• Picasso API
  • The Picasso API server uses Keystone authentication and authorization through its middleware.
• IronFunctions
  • Picasso leverages the backend container engine provided by IronFunctions, an open-source Serverless/FaaS platform based on Docker.

Resources

• OpenStack Wiki
  • https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Picasso
    
• Architecture
  • Picasso deployment architecture
  • Picasso/IronFunctions inter-component architecture
• Examples
  • Triggering functions from Telemetry and Aodh
  • Application that queries Nova for a list of running servers

We’ve created some initial blueprints to show what the future roadmap looks like for the project.

You can try out Picasso now on DevStack by following the quick start guide here. Let us know what you think!

If you’re interested in contributing or just have any questions, please join us on the #OpenStack channel in Slack.