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Ask HN: What are the alternatives to Amazon Lambda?

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hook.io supports lua, along with eleven other programming languages.

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

#72
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, this is basically what inetd and the likes have been doing for a long time. The reason why it isn't used for heavy services anymore is that every request will spawn a new process, and that's extremely expensive. That's like CGI at the socket level. The natural "solution" you have is to let your process run, and every time a new request comes from the network, it is merely redirected to your proce…

Seems like you could essentially implement an LRU container/process/etc. keepalive on top of and have your machines essentially fully-utilized with minimal latency for services being accessed recently.

No, what Lambda does is take your equivalent of CGI script, init it once and reuse the snapshot afterwards. It is completely oblivious to the process. As far as it is concerned, your script is just "take this from STDIN, do the magic, write on STDOUT and exit". There is no notion of keepalive because the script itself isn't supposed to stay alive. All the magic happens in the execution of the script.

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

#73
post #33
post #7

In a way, Amazon Lambda is just "upload a PHP script to my $3 shared webhost", except: - JavaScript/Java/Python instead of PHP - Can handle gigantic bucketloads of requests per second, transparently If you don't expect to scale super high, and if the actual language isn't sacred to you, then you can get the exact same ease of deployment and a comparably large ecosystem of open source on your favorite el cheapo webhos…

This is where PHP can really shine. I mean, you simply upload a script to a web server and have a new API endpoint...

You realize that Python, Perl (cgi), and even C, can do the same things? mod_xxxx

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

#74
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where PHP can really shine. I mean, you simply upload a script to a web server and have a new API endpoint...

You realize that Python, Perl (cgi), and even C, can do the same things? mod_xxxx

No, ever used them.

I read that PHP was created to be a better Pearl for web-applications, so I guessed that with Pearl it did work the same.

But I had the impression that languages like Python and C were used to directly develop application servers.

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

#75
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where PHP can really shine. I mean, you simply upload a script to a web server and have a new API endpoint...

You realize that Python, Perl (cgi), and even C, can do the same things? mod_xxxx

In practice, you can't: stuff like mod_python was never popular and never really gained a foothold in the shared-hosting market.

Deploying a python script today means either building a VPS or hunting for a niche provider like webfaction (which will still need you to drop to the shell in most cases anyway). It's another level of skill required.

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

#76
We have been working on something like this as well using docker containers. We call it Bakula its still in an early alpha phase.

The idea is that instead of writing to a particular API it listens for events and mounts a filesystem. Then you just process files in the filesystem as your events and delete them when they are done.

The code can be found on github at: https://github.com/immuta/bakula

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

#77
Inspired by Amazon Lambda I started working a few days ago in a similar project: Nervio [0]

It is currently a very early alpha. Today I have planned to hide all NATS references to have a very simple and agnostic API for components.

[0] https://github.com/nervio/nervio/

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