Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by andrewstuart2 » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 11:29 PM UTC

digikata wrote: post #35

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inetd ?

If you go to the second link I provided, Poettering explicitly mentions inetd. He also elaborates on what makes socket activation different.

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

#62

Post by HappyTypist » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 12:28 AM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #45

ryan_sb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think the previous poster was talking about using cron jobs to prevent functions from going cold.

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

#63

Post by dchesterton » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 2:21 AM UTC

vosper wrote: post #34

dchesterton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

You may be interested to know that Lambda now supports scheduling: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-lambda-update-python-vp... Edit: Oh, are you saying that you want to send an API call to schedule something? They say in the post that API support is coming, but I don't know if you could schedule a one-off run that way.

Yeah, we connect with other services so we need the ability to programmatically re-schedule a function to run in ~5 minutes if it failed the first time.

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

#64

Post by _Marak_ » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 2:35 AM UTC

vicwhiten wrote: post #30

http://hook.io/ lets you link a gist script to a webhook, very similar. Open source & free.

Hey! Awesome! Just saw a nice bump in signups from this post, thank you!

I'm the sole creator of hook.io. I actually beat Amazon Lamda to market by over a month before they announced...so technically Lamda is a clone of my service! :-)

We are making a bit of revenue now and users really like the service.

We could really use an angel investment to push development forward. I've funded development for the entire project for the past 13 months out of pocket. We have no debt and almost no overhead.

Someone should invest in hook.io!

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

#65

Post by Rapzid » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 2:43 AM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #16

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.

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

The node version was OLD last I checked; no harmony features.

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

#66

Post by _Marak_ » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 2:48 AM UTC

wbc wrote: post #51

vicwhiten wrote: post #30

http://hook.io/ lets you link a gist script to a webhook, very similar. Open source & free.

it's continuously making requests to /totalHits/ if you check the network, is that intentional?

Yes, that is the update counter for the live deployment count on the homepage. It constantly polling our total deployment count and updating the value on the homepage.

I'm a bit of a fan of putting unnecessary stress on our servers in a controlled fashion. This gives me a bit of wiggle room if we need to free up resources in an emergency...which still hasn't happened yet. :-)

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

#67

Post by willcosgrove » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 4:03 AM UTC

christiangenco wrote: post #36

vicwhiten wrote: post #30

http://hook.io/ lets you link a gist script to a webhook, very similar. Open source & free.

Oh man, this is exactly what I've been looking for for a long time. What a brilliantly simple implementation! FYI: it looks like they have a really generous referral program[1], so post your referral link (shameless example: https://hook.io/christiangenco?s ) and I'll tweet the developer to see if you can get retroactive credit. 1. https://hook.io/referrals

https://webscript.io is also pretty awesome, if you're willing to learn some Lua.

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

#68

Post by rowbot » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 4:07 AM UTC

rakoo wrote: post #21

Webscript ( https://www.webscript.io/ ) but it's Lua only.

I tried that once. If you are looking to invoke HTTP web services or SMTP mail services from the web then it is good. ie., as online services not stored on your system.

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

#69

Post by rowbot » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 4:09 AM UTC

If you are looking to host a "PHP script" free, you should consider 000webhost. OR any shared host, the host you are using now.

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

#70

Post by _delirium » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 5:32 AM UTC

TeeWEE wrote: post #14

amelius wrote: post #9

Newbie question: what does "Amazon Lambda" have to do with functional programming? (Because the name suggests there is a connection).

Actually not much. Its called lambdo because you can deploy functions to the cloud, but those functions can be written in a non functional style

That's the case for most uses of "lambda" in programming languages too. It just means something like "anonymous function". I believe Lisp was the first language to introduce lambda as a keyword, and that's how it uses it: (lambda (x) ...) creates an anonymous function, but the body of the function doesn't have to be written in a functional style. In fact the modern concept of "functional style" didn't exist at the time.