Open Web Services

Introduction

Open Web Services (OWS) is an Open Source alternative for some popular managed services offered by major cloud providers:

Service	AWS equivalent	Azure equivalent	GCS equivalent	Status
Permissions	IAM	RBAC	IAM	MVP
Serverless compute	Lambda Functions	Azure Functions	Cloud Functions	MVP
REST APIs	API Gateway	API Management	API Gateway	MVP
Database tables	DynamoDB	Cosmos DB	Firestore	Todo
Storage	S3	Blob Storage	Cloud Storage	Todo
Events	EventBridge	Event Grid	Eventarc	Todo
DNS	Route53	Azure DNS	Cloud DNS	Todo
CDN	CloudFront	Front Door	Cloud CDN	Todo
Workflows	Step Functions	Logic Apps	Workflows	Todo
Private repositories	CodeCommit	Azure Repos	Cloud Source Repositories	Todo
CI/CD	CodePipeline	Azure Pipelines	Cloud Build	Todo
...

To achieve high up-times and resilience, OWS uses a P2P network of private servers. Each participating server runs the OWS node, which hosts the managed services and syncs server state with peers. All peers are equal and never assume master roles.

The OWS client queries node state and submits infrastructure configuration changes, called change sets. Change sets are signed by the client, and are only accepted by the nodes if the signer has the necessary permissions.

User documentation:

• Download

Architecture:

1. P2P Network
2. Ledger
3. Node
4. Client

Motivation

The major cloud providers have the following advantages:

• High up-times
• Innovative solutions for event-driven micro-service architectures

But using them comes with the following disadvantages:

• High-end servers are more expensive than smaller competitors
• Vendor lock-in: using vendor-specific managed services makes migrating to another cloud provider very difficult

The latter disadvantage has recently been amplified by global political uncertainty, especially for companies using foreign datacenters.

OWS runs on standard technologies, so it can be used with any cloud provider (or any combination of cloud providers). Migrating an OWS project to another cloud provider is seemless.

Nice-to-haves:

• Instantaneous and atomic deployments
• Ability to test complete infrastructure deployments locally

Why not Terraform?

Terraform is a cloud-agnostic IaC language and deployment tool, it however does not offer cloud-agnostic abstractions of eg. serverless functions.

Contributing

Emulating all popular managed services is a huge amount of work, which is only feasible if multiple entities collaborate.

OWS is Open Source, with a BSD-3-Clause license.

The node and client are written in Golang.

Todo:

• Implement the OWS equivalent of each popular managed service
• Ability to derive change sets from JSON files, allowing OWS nodes to be configured using Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• A React Single Page Application (SPA) hosted by the client, inspired by the AWS console, and written in Typescript
• A Typescript library for IaC, inspired by the declarative AWS Typescript CDK
• Advanced change set validation, based on git commit signatures or other signatures
• The node automatically installs install itself and creates a /etc/init.d/ows script when running in detached mode
• Client binaries compatible with Windows and MacOS
• ...