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Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

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Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#61

Post by weeefun »

callumlocke wrote: post #21

I made an image hosting tool on Lambda and S3, for internal corporate use. Staff can upload images to S3 via an SPA. The front end contacts the Lambda service to request a pre-signed S3 upload URL, so the browser can upload directly to S3. It works really well. Observations: 1. Took too long to get something working. The common use case of hooking up a Lambda function to an HTTP endpoint is surprisingly fiddly and ma…

Although I've just started using AWS Lambda and think it's a cool technology to use, I can understand your points.

2) Logging is indeed painful! You definitely need a separate tool/system for that. I have created a small CLI tool to view logs of multiple Lambdas which have been deployed using a CloudFormation template: https://github.com/seeebiii/lambdalogs This does not replace a good external system, but it can help for small searches in the logs.

4) Yes, this takes a lot. Though I'm not using the Serverless framework, deploying the code using CloudFormation takes me about 2:30 minutes (with a project using Java Lambdas), because CF is doing lots of checks in the background. I also wrote a tool for this to decrease the waiting time and just update the JS/Java code instead of the whole stack: https://github.com/seeebiii/lambda-updater

Hope this helps you or someone else a bit!

Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#62

Post by 3minus1 »

davidvanleeuwen wrote: post #59

After multiple side projects with Lambda (e.g. image processing services), we finally implemented it on larger scale. Initially we started out without any framework or tool to help, because there we pretty much non-existent at that time. We created our own tool, and used Swagger a lot for working with API gateway (because it is really bad to work with). Over time everything smoothened out and really worked nicely (ex…

why is API gateway so bad?

Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#63

Post by zceee12 »

Dawny33 wrote: post #50

- We use Lambda along with Ansible to execute huge, distributed ML workloads which are (completely)serverless. Saves a lot of bucks, as ML needs huge boxes. - For serverless APIs for querying the S3 which is a result of the above workload Difficulties faced with Lambda(till now): 1. No way to do CD for Lambda functions. [Not yet using SAM] 2. Lambda launches in its own VPC. Is there a way to make AWS launch my lambda…

2. You can! Although it's a bit tedious. You need to also ensure the function has EIP allocation permissions.

Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#64

Post by weeefun »

scrollaway wrote: post #45

We use AWS Lambda to process Hearthstone replay files. My #1 concern with it went away a while back when Amazon finally added support for Python 3 (3.6). It behaved as advertised: Allowed us to scale without worrying about scaling. After a year of using it however I'm really not a big fan of the technology. It's opaque. Pulling logs, crashes and metrics out of it is like pulling teeth. There's a lot of bells and whis…

Regarding the problem that you want to read the costs per function: have you considered using resources tags? This could help a bit when evaluating your costs (though not directly on the bill). https://aws.amazon.com/answers/account-management/aws-taggin...

Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#65

Post by ransom1538 »

I used it for converting images to BPG format and do resizing. I really enjoyed it. Basically with Docker/lambda these days I feel like the future will be 'having code' and then 'running it' (no more ssh, puppet, kuberdummies, bash, vpc, drama). Once lambda runs a docker file it might take over middle earth. These were my issues with lambda:

1. Installing your own linux modifications isn't trivial (we had to install the bpg encoder). They use a strange version of the linux ami.

2. Lambda can listen to events from S3 (creation,deletion,..) but can't seem to listen to SQS events WTF? It seems like amazon could fix this really easily.

3. Deployment is wonky. To add a new lambda zip file you need to delete the current one. This can take up to 40 seconds (which you would have total downtime).

Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#66

Post by brango »

callumlocke wrote: post #21

I made an image hosting tool on Lambda and S3, for internal corporate use. Staff can upload images to S3 via an SPA. The front end contacts the Lambda service to request a pre-signed S3 upload URL, so the browser can upload directly to S3. It works really well. Observations: 1. Took too long to get something working. The common use case of hooking up a Lambda function to an HTTP endpoint is surprisingly fiddly and ma…

Chalice [1] makes hooking up lambda to HTTP endpoints easy, provided you don't mind using AWS API Gateway (and using python).

I use it to handle a contact form on a static web site. It works really well.

[1] https://github.com/awslabs/chalice

Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#67

Post by gallamine »

scrollaway wrote: post #45

We use AWS Lambda to process Hearthstone replay files. My #1 concern with it went away a while back when Amazon finally added support for Python 3 (3.6). It behaved as advertised: Allowed us to scale without worrying about scaling. After a year of using it however I'm really not a big fan of the technology. It's opaque. Pulling logs, crashes and metrics out of it is like pulling teeth. There's a lot of bells and whis…

Can you clarify this point:

> its strength is in distributed processing; in other words, long-running CPU-bound apps.

it seems to me that's an explicit non-usecase for Lambda given it limits sessions to < 5min per invocation.

Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#68

Post by Mizza »

cameronmaske wrote: post #55

I've been using AWS Lambda on a side project (octodocs.com) that is powered by Django and uses Zappa to manage deployments. I was initially attracted to it as a low-cost tool to run a database (RDS) powered service side project. Some thoughts: - Zappa is a great tool. They added async task support [1] which replaced the need for celery or rq. Setting up https with let's encrypt takes less than 15 minutes. They added…

Zappa author here, thank you for your kind recommendation!

Lots more features in the pipeline, too!

Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#69

Post by scrollaway »

gallamine wrote: post #67
scrollaway wrote: post #45

We use AWS Lambda to process Hearthstone replay files. My #1 concern with it went away a while back when Amazon finally added support for Python 3 (3.6). It behaved as advertised: Allowed us to scale without worrying about scaling. After a year of using it however I'm really not a big fan of the technology. It's opaque. Pulling logs, crashes and metrics out of it is like pulling teeth. There's a lot of bells and whis…

Can you clarify this point: > its strength is in distributed processing; in other words, long-running CPU-bound apps. it seems to me that's an explicit non-usecase for Lambda given it limits sessions to < 5min per invocation.

I should have been more specific yes. I actually meant CPU-or-network-bound tasks with a predictable, sub-5min runtime.

Like I said we use it for game replay processing, so that's 5-15 second tasks that read and parse log files and hit a db and s3 with the results.

Other suitable tasks: image resizing, API chatter, bounded video transcoding, etc. Lambda is pretty good at distributed processing (as long as you can make the bill work in your favour, over hosting your own overprovisioned fleet).

Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?

#70

Post by scrollaway »

weeefun wrote: post #64
scrollaway wrote: post #45

We use AWS Lambda to process Hearthstone replay files. My #1 concern with it went away a while back when Amazon finally added support for Python 3 (3.6). It behaved as advertised: Allowed us to scale without worrying about scaling. After a year of using it however I'm really not a big fan of the technology. It's opaque. Pulling logs, crashes and metrics out of it is like pulling teeth. There's a lot of bells and whis…

Regarding the problem that you want to read the costs per function: have you considered using resources tags? This could help a bit when evaluating your costs (though not directly on the bill). https://aws.amazon.com/answers/account-management/aws-taggin...

I've read about them yeah. A friend also showed me recently the power of stuffing the advanced billing CSVs into Redshift and querying them with Tableau or something.

Personally, I think it's all fucking ridiculous the amount of effort you have to spend into reading your own bill.

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