The latest addition here is to show how to capture screenshots from locally rendered HTML/CSS - perfect for social banners. Sites like Banner bear (no affiliation) are charging a fee for this kind of function, and all the better for it. Folks should charge for their work.

But if you are comfortable hosting openfaas (3 EUR / mo on Hetzner using faasd) then you can do it a lot cheaper and run additional webhooks / APIs / blogs / integrations there too.

A banner generation website will cost 49 USD / mo for 1000 images, 99 USD / mo for 10,000 images. Or 3 EUR / mo for faasd.

https://github.com/openfaas/faasd

Hey Alex I just wanted to say that I read your blog with pleasure! Thanks for all the sharing

https://blog.alexellis.io/

Thank you, I appreciate it. Do check out my GitHub profile for my sponsors link - I send out weekly emails and have an additional portal that folks can log into too. https://github.com/alexellis/

Nice! I'm sure I'll find a use for this sort of integration in the near future. Thanks for including great documentation and a tutorial link on the github page.

You're welcome. There's even more for OpenFaaS sponsors in the "Treasure Trove", feel free to check it out if you want to get more value, and support OSS at the same time - https://github.com/sponsors/openfaas

(a bit off topic - apologies for that), I find OpenFaaS fascinating. Where can I find case studies / documented use-case for its usage?

Did you try the docs, the blog or YouTube? You'll find plenty of information there. Feel free to start with https://github.com/openfaas/faas/blob/master/ADOPTERS.md

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt06Z28uzPA

Just discovered your article “Introduction to web testing and scraping” and will try it out. Exactly had the problem of scaling last time I tried out to run several headless browser. Thanks for this!

Do you mean https://www.openfaas.com/blog/puppeteer-scraping/ ?

There are more traditional tools and SaaS services based around the web-driver model, which might be useful for folks who don't want to get into infrastructure, and don't want the latency of using Lambda. In testing I saw 15s+ for visiting a simple website that took 1-2s locally in a container.

Feel free to give the content a try and let us know how it goes for you? OpenFaaS can also run these tasks async and queue them up / process from a queue.