New Event Sources and Other Updates in v0.5.0 of the OpenWhisk Plugin for the Serverless Framework

Mar 21, 2017

Multi-provider support was a goal we laid out following the Serverless Framework v1 release. Since then we've been working towards simplifying the process of moving applications between cloud providers to enable the development of multi-cloud Serverless apps. All while keeping the Serverless workflow and developer experience consistent across providers so you don't need to learn custom commands or syntax for each platform.

OpenWhisk integration launched earlier this year. The official OpenWhisk provider plugin allows developers to build, deploy and manage apps running on the OpenWhisk platform using the Serverless Framework.

Special shout out to James Thomas (@thomasj) at IBM for his awesome contribution spearheading this effort!

OpenWhisk recently released v0.5.0 of the plugin, adding support for Cloudant DB and IBM Message Hub events, exporting Web Actions and local OpenWhisk deployments.

openwhisk banner

Use the following command to upgrade the provider plugin to the latest version.

npm update -g serverless-openwhisk

Due to an outstanding issue with provider plugins, the OpenWhisk provider must be installed as a global module.

New Features Supported in v0.5.0

  • IBM Message Hub Events - Functions can be bound to events from IBM Message Hub (“Apache Kafka”-as-a-Service) using a new event type (message_hub). Functions will be fired with the batch of messages received since the last invocation. Service credentials can be automatically read from an OpenWhisk package. Learn more in the docs.
  • IBM Cloudant DB Events - Functions can be bound to events from IBM Cloudant (“CouchDB”-as-a-Service) using a new event type (cloudant). Functions are invoked for each database modification surfaced through the CouchDB _changes feed. Service credentials can be automatically read from an OpenWhisk package. Learn more in the docs.
  • Export Web Actions - Functions can be turned into [“web actions”] which return HTTP content without use of an API Gateway. This feature is enabled by setting an annotation (web-export) in the configuration file. Learn more in the docs.
  • Support Local OpenWhisk Deployments - This plugin now supports targeting OpenWhisk instances without valid SSL certificates. Developers running personal instances of the platform often do not have a custom SSL certificate set up for their domain.

See the milestone release on GitHub or the OpenWhisk blog for full details on the new features and bug fixes. Items planned for the next release are shown in the 0.6 milestone.

Getting Started with OpenWhisk & Serverless

Resources to help you get started developing apps with OpenWhisk and the Serverless Framework.

Let us know if you have feature requests (or find bugs) by opening issues in the GitHub repository.

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