Image Mitosis

An experiment in measuring the efficiency and performance of various serverless cloud platforms (starting with IBM Cloud). Also, it's a really fun programming challenge.

Purpose

This is the code for a serverless function that accepts the URL to an publically accessible image file, requests it, splits it into two equal parts along its longest axis (or vertically, if each axis is equal), writes the two halves to an object storage bucket, and then triggers two more instances of itself with the locations of the newly created images it just uploaded.

This will repeat until the output images are 50x50 pixels, at which point the process halts.

Installation and Running (locally)

1. Clone this repo
2. Enter the cloned directory
3. Run npm i to install dependencies
4. Create a .env file and populate with the required environment parameters (detailed below)
5. Run node invoke.js to run the program locally

Building dependencies for OpenWhisk (w. Node 8.9.1), and packaging + deploying for IBM Cloud

This function has a native dependency which needs to be built for the target system. Fortunately, Docker makes it easy to build native dependecies for remote systems.

(These instructions are derived from James' instructions)

1. Install Docker on your system
2. Install the Ubuntu Trusty (6.7) Docker image from nodesource docker pull nodesource/trusty:6.7.
3. Install the JavaScript Node.js dependencies npm install.
4. Compile the native dependencies with Docker npm run compile-docker.
5. Package the newly compiled dependencies for use on OpenWhisk with npm run package.
6. Upload to OpenWhisk with wsk action update [YOUR ACTION NAME] --kind nodejs:8 action.zip

Environment variables and other prerequisites

The following are environment variables required to successfully run this program.

STORAGE_KEY

• An API key for an IBM Cloud Object Storage instance

OBJECT_STORAGE_ENDPOINT

• The endpoint for the IBM Cloud Object Storage instance you wish to write files to.

OBJECT_INSTANCE_ID

• The instance ID for the IBM Cloud Object Storage instance.

INVOCATION_FUNCTION_URL

• The public URL to invoke the cloud function at the successful conclusion of this program (This should be the URL of this function when uploaded to the Openwhisk/IBM Cloud Function platform.)

BUCKETENDPOINT

• The hostname of the IBM Cloud Storage bucket

BUCKETNAME

• The name of the bucket you wish to write files to.

TEST_FILE

• A publically accessible URL to an image file that you wish to divide.

To do...

• Add logging of events processes to external database for later analysis
• Use serverless framework for easy cross-platform deployment of function for testing
• Create naming convention to enable piecing together of smaller images to recreate the whole
• Document the foils and foibles of implementing this across the different cloud platforms.
• Document the mapping and acquisition of IBM Cloud Object Storage variables across to AWS-SDK variables.
• Document deployment to the various cloud platforms (but predominently IBM Cloud)