Fn Project & Caddy for Fun & Learning by Dan Anderson

As a Product Manager who does some weekend hacking, I love finding open source projects and technologies that help demonstrate important concepts in the web services world. As I crawl up the technology learning curve it’s great to take seemingly abstract concepts such as containers and serverless and employ them in simple but illustrative ways.

I was an early user of Iron.io for hosted workers and enthusiastically followed co-founders Chad Arimura (@chadarimura) and Travis Reeder (@treeder) as Iron.io gained traction in the marketplace.

When I heard that Chad and Travis’ focus moved to the Fn Project, I jumped at the chance to try it to build a deeper understanding of serverless and FaaS. I deployed the Fn server to a Digital Ocean “droplet” and never looked back. I used the Fn Project to support prototypes and personal projects so my requirements were rudimentary such as functions for messaging (text, email) and basic file processing.

One need that surfaced was invoking functions in a more secure manner. Since my deployment was exposed to the web rather than behind an enterprise or cloud firewall, that meant at least making https requests. What was not on my short list of concepts to learn was complex web server configuration and obtaining SSL certificates.

Enter Caddy, one of my other favorite open source projects from Matt Holt (@mholt6) and a team of fellow contributors. Caddy (https://caddyserver.com/) is an open source web server and an early player in automatic provisioning of free SSL certificates (Let’s Encrypt certs). Read the complete article here.

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