toastainer

Toastainer

Toastainer is an open-source self - hosted platform designed for running serverless code instances on your own infrastructure. Serverless computing offers a streamlined way for teams to share computing resources without the hassle of managing and maintaining physical servers. This approach delivers a highly scalable and cost-efficient solution for deploying and managing applications, enabling teams to focus on innovation and collaboration.

Here's an overview of the key features and concepts of Toastainer:

• Self-hosted: Toastainer can be installed and run on your own hardware or cloud infrastructure, giving you control over the environment in which your serverless code instances operate.

• Code instances: In the context of Toastainer, an instance refers to a single execution of your serverless code. Instances are initiated by incoming requests and can be joined by multiple following requests simultaneously. This unique feature enables new possibilities in serverless computing, such as live messaging, video streaming, and gaming.

• Supported protocols: Toastainer supports both HTTP and Websocket requests, allowing for a wide range of application use cases. This also allows the platform to connect different types of requests within the same running code instance, further enhancing its real-time capabilities.

• Autoscaling: Toastainer allows you to set a timeout and maximum number of joiners for each live code instance, enabling instances to scale up or down based on incoming requests. This ensures efficient resource usage and optimal responsiveness.

• Instance control: You have the option to force a request to join a specific instance by providing its ID. This can be useful in certain scenarios where you need some users to join the same instance.

• Custom OS images: Toastainer supports the use of custom OS images, which means you can configure your environment to work with any programming language. This provides flexibility in choosing the technology stack that best suits your application's requirements.

In summary, Toastainer offers a powerful serverless platform that can handle multiple requests concurrently within a single code instance, unlocking new possibilities for real-time applications like live messaging, video streaming, and gaming. Its self-hosted nature, supported protocols, autoscaling features, instance control, and custom OS image support make it a robust solution for a wide range of serverless applications.

Project status

This project is still under active development. It's usable, but expect some rough edges while work is underway. If you are interested in working on or building with Toastainer, please join our Discord and let us know. We are happy to get you started.

Installation

Requirements

• Install packages with APT package manager: apt-get install autoconf bison flex gcc g++ git libprotobuf-dev libnl-route-3-dev libtool make pkg-config btrfs-progs protobuf-compiler uidmap

• Redis instance

• Relational database (MySQL, Mariadb)

Rootfs

See docs/rootfs

Setup

# if you do not have a non root user
groupadd -g 1000 toastainer --system
adduser --system --uid 1000 --gid 1000 --disabled-password --disabled-login toastainer
sudo -su toastainer
cd ~
mkdir toastainer

sudo -s

apt update && apt install git libprotobuf-dev libnl-route-3-dev libtool btrfs-progs protobuf-compiler uidmap

# The name tveth1 that will be used by the runner can be set in the configuration file
# It will be cloned and put inside Toaster's net linux namespace
ip link add dev tveth0 type veth peer name tveth1
ip link set dev tveth0 up
ip link set dev tveth1 up

# 10.0.0.0/16 is by convention a block of private addresses that we will use to attribute ip addresses to Toasters
# You may use another one as long as it is a conventional private address space as defined in http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1918.html
ip addr add 10.166.0.1/16 broadcast 10.166.255.255 dev tveth0

# If there are no forbidden ip addresses
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.166.0.0/16 -j MASQUERADE

# Here we forbid toasters from connecting to an AWS VPC private ip addresses
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.166.0.0/16 ! -d 172.16.0.0/12 -j MASQUERADE

# Here is another way to forbid some address spaces using a blackhole redirection
# See https://superuser.com/questions/1436913/what-is-ip-address-0-0-0-1-for-and-how-to-use-it/1436941 for address 0.0.0.1
# 169.254.169.254 is a special AWS IP used to retrieve metadata about the current EC2 instance - we forbid all 169.254. link local addresses for this reason>
iptables -t nat -N BLACKHOLE
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -s 10.166.0.0/16 -d 169.254.0.0/16,172.16.0.0/12,10.0.0.0/8,192.168.0.0/16,$LOCAL_SERVER_IP/32 -j BLACKHOLE -j BLACKHOLE
iptables -t nat -A BLACKHOLE -j DNAT --to-destination 0.0.0.1 # -j does not work anymore here with newer versions of iptables
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.166.0.0/16 -j MASQUERADE

echo 'net.ipv4.ip_forward=1' >> /etc/sysctl.conf

sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

# we need an explicit name server ip address in resolv.conf for toasters to have access to internet
echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" >> /etc/resolv.conf

Also the home folder and all its ancestors should be owned by toastainer user, for example ubuntu or uid/gid 1000

Build the toastainer binary

Run

make build

Usage

./toastainer

Roadmap

• Toaster build and execution commands defaults for other languages

• Custom non root domain names for toasters

• Full Documentation

• Support other email and object storage providers

• Packaging and automated installation for major environments

• Live update support

• Distributed Multi-Cloud Providers and Multi-Regions network of toastainer nodes

• Multi-Cloud Providers Autoscaling

• Databases as a service for toasters

• Full featured with fast boot times virtual machines instead of containers in order to be able to install and run any program

• Support root custom domain names with a custom nameserver for their DNS Zone