The Apache OpenWhisk platform provides us with the features and functionality that allow us to set up our own platform for running serverless applications. The project provides the functionality for executing functions based on the triggering of certain events in the environment.

The execution of these functions happens inside the docker containers, and the OpenWhisk platform manages the deployment and scaling of these functions inside it.

Here are some of the features provided by the platform:

• Easy-to-use tools: The platform provides a number of tools that allow us to easily package and port the application to run on the OpenWhisk platform, with the exception of having the application follow a set of conventions as defined by the platform.
• Isolation using containers: The platform isolates the different functions through the use of docker containers, such that every function runs inside its own isolated environment so as to avoid any kind of environmental-dependency conflicts.
• Support for a wide variety of languages: The OpenWhisk platform provides us with a number of supported language platforms that we can use to build our serverless application. This also includes the use of binary executables built using Go, C++, and Rust.
• Built-in API Gateway: The OpenWhisk package comes with its own built-in API gateway, allowing us to easily integrate the applications through the use of RESTful API endpoints.

All of these functionalities make OpenWhisk a great platform for running the serverless applications, be it on the cloud or in your local development environment.

But, before we start building the application, we need to have OpenWhisk deployed on our system. To deploy the project, please follow the steps in the Technical requirements section at the beginning of this chapter.

For the demo, we are going to build an application that queries the GitHub API for us and retrieves the repositories that are associated with our user account.