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Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#191

Post by wanghq »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #39
bufferoverflow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you store your state? I assume DynamoDB part isn't serverless.

DynamoDB is very much serverless :) I'd highly recommend to anyone remotely interested in serverless and/or databases to read the Dynamo whitepaper to get an idea of how it works: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo....

I'd like to point out that the DynamoDB implementation is quite different than the Dynamo paper. They are totally different things, almost like the relationship between Java and Javascript.

DynamoDB is great, especially when it's used wisely.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#192

Post by wanghq »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #36
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we're serving client web traffic directly with Lambdas via API Gateway. We have no traditional instances or non-serverless components of any kind in the core stack.

So how do you store your state? I assume DynamoDB part isn't serverless.

To me, DynamoDB is not quite serverless, because users still pay for the reserved capacity units. In contrast, Lambda functions scale automatically.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#193

Post by lifeisstillgood »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #190
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still a year long, 1/4M or more speculative investment. I would not moan too loudly about mgmt interference prolonging the project - that was a rare piece of long term willingness to invest for future technical gains - rare in my experience. (But imo the only way) well a moan bit loudly...

Yes, it was/is a rare opportunity and I'm very grateful I had/have it. (That being said, the potential upsides are in the range of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, even with only minimal success - so there is definitely a very real business incentive to invest in the project.) The prolongment I'm referring to isn't to do with the project being put on hold or anything like that. Essentially what happened was i…

Woah - potential upsides in 8-9 figures ?

So without digging in to who the client is etc, are you saying that serverless architecture is today, validated enough that the AWS bill can be cut by ... what 25%? more?

That sounds like great savings (plus nice fat contractor bills for rewriting as lambda) - but is it a hit for amazon

(I suspect amazon views it as "kill your own babies" survival but am interested in the margin effect on the data centre business - it's twenty years since i touched a business model of a DC)

PS I get the prolongment issue - it sounds sensible in the 20 seconds it was covered in the approval meeting, but not when the details are looked at.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#194

Post by freedomben »

lucasgonze wrote: post #170
aequitas wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I always get the feeling you need some sort of exit strategy to a traditional model for when your service starts lifting of. Never did the cost calculations though.

That gets to lock-in. The stacks are super proprietary. Porting away from AWS to another serverless cloud vendor (e.g. Azure) would be a major project. Porting to a server-ful architecture would be a full rewrite.

At one point I was highly concerned with lock-in, but I'm becoming less so. in the last 7 or 8 years the companies I've worked for have exclusively used AWS, and prices have come down and stayed competitive. Giving up the platform-independence also allows you to take advantage of platform specific features, which can make development a lot faster.

I still think platform neutrality is a good goal, but I'm starting to view it like I do database neutrality. It's great in theory to be able to swap out postgres with mysql and vice versa, but you miss out on a lot of features of postgres that aren't portable. And in practice, I've never swapped out postgres for something else. Just some thoughts.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#196

Post by not_kurt_godel »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #193
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it was/is a rare opportunity and I'm very grateful I had/have it. (That being said, the potential upsides are in the range of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, even with only minimal success - so there is definitely a very real business incentive to invest in the project.) The prolongment I'm referring to isn't to do with the project being put on hold or anything like that. Essentially what happened was i…

Woah - potential upsides in 8-9 figures ? So without digging in to who the client is etc, are you saying that serverless architecture is today, validated enough that the AWS bill can be cut by ... what 25%? more? That sounds like great savings (plus nice fat contractor bills for rewriting as lambda) - but is it a hit for amazon (I suspect amazon views it as "kill your own babies" survival but am interested in the mar…

This is a new project, not migration of anything existing. "Upsides" was referring to business value of the project itself, not cost savings of migrating to serverless.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#197

Post by niftylettuce »

jonathan-kosgei wrote: post #103
twistedpair wrote: post #102

@ mabl (mabl.com) we've been running a serverless backend on Google Cloud Functions for over a year. It's handled 600M function calls/month without much trouble. Our findings are: * Eventually you need to promote a function to legitimate service for cost savings (e.g. GCF ️ AppEngine Node service) • You need a buffer (e.g. GCF outscales services it calls) such as Pub/Sub • Multi-repo/project layout is best for deploy…

Any links on how to implement your email routing setup?

If you need simple email forwarding you can use this https://forwardemail.net (it's FOSS)

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#198

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

citrablue wrote: post #187
jonathan-kosgei wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We're starting to ramp up traffic now by orders of magnitude (with many more to come) and it's soooooo awesome knowing the stack is pretty much bombproof. This does come with additional cost. Serverless pricing doesn't scale, your costs increase linearly with your usage, and there're no discounts for bulk usage or reserved pricing. We were recently on the receiving end of a massive HTTP GET Flood DDoS and although w…

Curious - are you in an industry where you expected bad actors? I'm not blaming you -- far from it! Just wondering how applicable your experience is to the world I normally work in.

Not particularly no.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#199

Post by jchanimal »

aequitas wrote: post #89
atmosx wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your setup, although appealing from an AWS ecosystem perspective, sounds like a bit expensive to me on a first reading. Of course everything depends on the specifics but Lambdas and DynamoDB are expensive at scale. I wonder how it compares cost-wise to a more traditional solution.

Indeed, I always get the feeling you need some sort of exit strategy to a traditional model for when your service starts lifting of. Never did the cost calculations though.

This is one reason we (FaunaDB) offer on-premise as well as managed cloud options. So you can run the database on any machines you want. When ease-of-use matters most, small scale apps are cheaper on cloud. With high transaction volumes, you can pre-purchase cloud capacity or run on your own iron.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#200

Post by lifeisstillgood »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #196
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah - potential upsides in 8-9 figures ? So without digging in to who the client is etc, are you saying that serverless architecture is today, validated enough that the AWS bill can be cut by ... what 25%? more? That sounds like great savings (plus nice fat contractor bills for rewriting as lambda) - but is it a hit for amazon (I suspect amazon views it as "kill your own babies" survival but am interested in the mar…

This is a new project, not migration of anything existing. "Upsides" was referring to business value of the project itself, not cost savings of migrating to serverless.

Thanks
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