Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 78 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

#41

Post by nostrademons »

johansch wrote: post #26
buu700 wrote: post #11

Google App Engine includes pretty much the same thing, except it's more mature since it's been around for ages. (JS isn't among its supported languages though — Go, Java, Python, PHP — but IIRC they may have recently added some kind of language-agnostic runtime.)

To me AWS Lambda is like a Brazil-like nightmare in bureaucracy ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/ ), while App Engine is equally powerful but a lot simpler to use. It's harder to make something simple and powerful than it is to make something complex and powerful, so hats off to the Google engineers involved.

It took Google a long time to get there - I remember checking out AppEngine in 2007 and wondering why anyone would ever use it instead of EC2, and then checking it out in 2009 and wondering how the hell to put together a working app, and then checking it out in 2010 and giving up in frustration, and then finally checking it out in 2012 and finding it was actually pretty useful for prototypes.

Re: Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

#42

Post by carimura »

dchesterton wrote: post #25
neilellis wrote: post #3

Iron Workers: http://www.iron.io/worker/ Most new breed Docker hosts like http://tutum.co can give you a quick DIY version. But in general they (Amazon) are (currently) the best of breed and I have only positive things to say having used the JS and Java versions.

We're using IronWorker and Lambda for a current project. Our (Go) code can run on either and we've designed the app to easily swap out the backend in case of service failure. Pros of IronWorker: More language support, better logging, easier to debug, scheduled tasks via API (this is the main thing stopping us going all in on Lambda). Cons: Slower start up time (~2-3s on average compared to milliseconds with Lambda),…

Thanks for the synopsis. Lots of plans for IronWorker including fully custom Docker image support (soon) and millisecond response times (soon'ish). We also support custom configurations of CPU/RAM for dedicated customers which is what most of our customers with stricter SLA's utilize.

That said, a big differentiator is IronWorker's ability to be deployed to any cloud provider as well as private clouds / on-premises. Many of our enterprise customers need hybrid deployments.

We're always listening so please feel free to shoot us feedback at support[at]iron.io or find us at @getiron.

Chad @ Iron.io

Re: Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

#43

Post by johansch »

nostrademons wrote: post #41
johansch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me AWS Lambda is like a Brazil-like nightmare in bureaucracy ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/ ), while App Engine is equally powerful but a lot simpler to use. It's harder to make something simple and powerful than it is to make something complex and powerful, so hats off to the Google engineers involved.

It took Google a long time to get there - I remember checking out AppEngine in 2007 and wondering why anyone would ever use it instead of EC2, and then checking it out in 2009 and wondering how the hell to put together a working app, and then checking it out in 2010 and giving up in frustration, and then finally checking it out in 2012 and finding it was actually pretty useful for prototypes.

The biggest disadvantage with Google from a global perspective: They don't have a chinese-hosted edition, unlike Amazon/Microsoft/IBM.

I understand and can identify with the why...but still, most global businesses want to target China.

Re: Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

#44

Post by Twirrim »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #18

One thing that strikes me as having really promising possibilities for doing something Lambda-esque is systemd socket activation [1]. You can essentially have no running services, and systemd will hold open a socket (port/unix/etc) and then it will spin up a given service if a request is made on that socket. As long as you build your "service" to handle a single request and shut down (maybe have an external db-access…

Welcome to inetd/xinetd. They've been around for a long time :)

Re: Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

#45

Post by marktangotango »

ryan_sb wrote: post #20
smt88 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you noticed any downsides to using Lambda over running a persistent Node server? Is there overhead in execution time, for example?

There's a warmup time when a function is first executed in a container that can be up to 2 seconds depending on what libraries you include (you pay for this time [1]). After the first execution, your function environment will stay "warm" for 10-15 minutes and it will only take 10-150ms to execute your function on a new event. The other big downside is every time your function goes "cold" you pay the cost of all the e…

Ha! Cronjob to keep functions from going cold! If everyone starts doing that, it will reck the cost structure of Lambda for Amazon, I wager. One wonders why they didn't consider the possibility of users doing just that.

Re: Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

#47

Post by akamel »

https://TaskMill.io is in early open preview; free for all

> TaskMill's extreme microservices OSS platform. Check-in your scripts to GitHub and we turn each into an HTTP endpoint. See how we are building a Docker-powered Open Cloud where we build on top of each other's scripts to Automate All The Things!

disclaimer; I am the founder of TaskMill

Re: Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

#48

Post by harrisonhjones »

akamel wrote: post #47

https://TaskMill.io is in early open preview; free for all > TaskMill's extreme microservices OSS platform. Check-in your scripts to GitHub and we turn each into an HTTP endpoint. See how we are building a Docker-powered Open Cloud where we build on top of each other's scripts to Automate All The Things! disclaimer; I am the founder of TaskMill

HN Hug of death? The website is down for me. I look forward to playing around with it.

Re: Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

#49

Post by basit »

harrisonhjones wrote: post #48
akamel wrote: post #47

https://TaskMill.io is in early open preview; free for all > TaskMill's extreme microservices OSS platform. Check-in your scripts to GitHub and we turn each into an HTTP endpoint. See how we are building a Docker-powered Open Cloud where we build on top of each other's scripts to Automate All The Things! disclaimer; I am the founder of TaskMill

HN Hug of death? The website is down for me. I look forward to playing around with it.

Seems to be working fine

Re: Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

#50

Post by akamel »

harrisonhjones wrote: post #48
akamel wrote: post #47

https://TaskMill.io is in early open preview; free for all > TaskMill's extreme microservices OSS platform. Check-in your scripts to GitHub and we turn each into an HTTP endpoint. See how we are building a Docker-powered Open Cloud where we build on top of each other's scripts to Automate All The Things! disclaimer; I am the founder of TaskMill

HN Hug of death? The website is down for me. I look forward to playing around with it.

was increasing capacity; enjoy and feedback welcome
Post reply on HN