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AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications a Reality

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Re: AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications a Reality

#21

Post by eistrati »

smt88 wrote: post #15
eistrati wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your use case and what language you are currently using. We are using nodejs and have built our own collection of libraries: https://github.com/MitocGroup/deep-framework And here is an example: https://github.com/MitocGroup/deep-microservices-todo-app Based on our experience, currently AWS Lambda is amazing for data / content / asset management use cases. Cold start is a known issue, which I hope AWS will…

How is the 0.10.x version of Node treating you? That's what's keeping me off of Lambda at the moment. I guess I could use Babel before deployment, but what about external libs? I'm thinking of the following workflow: 1. Write/debug with TypeScript -> ES6 on Node 5 2. Compile to a single file (not sure if I can use tsc or Babel for this -- basically just inline all the imports) 3. Transpile the resulting single file t…

I'll be honest, performance is not the best one :) That's why for the time being, we're using a combination of Lambda with ECS. Please don't quote me on that, but I have a feeling that by the time we're building the work-arounds, mine and your problems will be solved by the services ;)

Re: AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications a Reality

#22

Post by toddh »

sinatra wrote: post #2

We're considering using API Gateway and Lambda for our upcoming API service. Would love to hear feedback from anyone who's tried it. From the linked article, I got one gist [1] which wasn't very favorable for the API Gateway + Lambda setup. [1] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mpdehaan/d979252b9c69cfd1...

There's a lot of configuration. Using APIs keys takes like 25 steps. And I haven't really figured out a non really complicated way of creating a session between a web front-end and the API. And uploading code changes is a real PITA. But after that it just works.

As I've been programming an Alex backend I haven't really run into the cold start issues.

I have to admit this sort of Dashboard Driven Programming is quite alien, but there are benefits.

Re: AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications a Reality

#23

Post by jeffbarr »

teej wrote: post #14
sinatra wrote: post #2

We're considering using API Gateway and Lambda for our upcoming API service. Would love to hear feedback from anyone who's tried it. From the linked article, I got one gist [1] which wasn't very favorable for the API Gateway + Lambda setup. [1] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mpdehaan/d979252b9c69cfd1...

I'm so glad you asked this! I just built a service on API Gateway + Lambda in the past two weeks. Here's my unstructured thoughts - * I love that I don't have to provision any resources. The fact it will scale to volume automatically is a huge win. * Lambda was a treat to work with. We used it with Python. Both the web console and API interface worked great for us. * I was able to get Lambda development working end-t…

Have you reported any of your issues with the API Gateway to us? Please feel free to send them to me via the contact address in my HN profile and I will share them with the team ASAP!

Re: AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications a Reality

#25

Post by yeukhon »

count wrote: post #16
yeukhon wrote: post #12

If Lambda is able to expand the /tmp disk space from 500MB to a few GB I think that will further make the adopter better on my end. I have a requirement in which Lambda is a perfect solution except the disk space is not enough. Of course I can further divide the work into smaller chunks. If you have use distributed task library like Celery, just think of that no longer tie to your application, and you can run on even…

Can you mount an EFS on the lambda instance (I don't know, but that comes to mind as a possible solution), possibly via a java NFS daemon or something in userspace?

I have never done that before but I imagine no, you are not supposed to have access to the operating system and know where the instance is. Similar to SNS and SQS, you don't get an IP of your SQS. I could set up an EC2 instance with some storage, but that goes back to my current design. If you do get that IP :-) contact AWS. That's probably a million dollar vulnerability. I'd suppose underneath they run container/lxc! Also, sadly, EFS is only available in us-west oregon :|

Re: AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications a Reality

#26

Post by lqdc13 »

eistrati wrote: post #9
mikkom wrote: post #6

Serverless = using someone elses servers?

I like this explanation: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Serverless-Computing Quote - Serverless doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. It simply means that developers no longer have to think "that much" about them. Computing resources get used as services without having to manage around physical capacities or limits.

I actually think people end up thinking more about it.

Sometimes you have several "devops" people in a small team dealing with orchestrating these "serverless" deployments so as to reduce latency etc.

Re: AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications a Reality

#27

Post by alexbilbie »

epoch1970 wrote: post #24

How does one version control the scripts and easily deploy them? How does one test them on one's own computer when developing them? Must the scripts be uploaded into AWS after every change if testing is to be done?

It's very easy to test scripts locally - here's my quick and dirty SNS->lambda tester script - https://gist.github.com/alexbilbie/cd1a1309bd7267d860b0

Deployment is easy too; I've got a two line bash script that zips the code then uploads it using the AWS CLI.

Versioning documentation can be found here - http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/versioning-alias...

Re: AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications a Reality

#29

Post by twagner »

posabsolute wrote: post #5
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use a scheduled cron task in Lambda to make requests to keep your API hot.

Yeah we thought about that, but is it reliable? We were really not sure we could always get rid of the cold start issue.

AWS Lambda function schedules are driven off the same fault-tolerant, highly available service that powers SWF. (So...yes, they're reliable :)

Re: AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications a Reality

#30

Post by crabasa »

teej wrote: post #14
sinatra wrote: post #2

We're considering using API Gateway and Lambda for our upcoming API service. Would love to hear feedback from anyone who's tried it. From the linked article, I got one gist [1] which wasn't very favorable for the API Gateway + Lambda setup. [1] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mpdehaan/d979252b9c69cfd1...

I'm so glad you asked this! I just built a service on API Gateway + Lambda in the past two weeks. Here's my unstructured thoughts - * I love that I don't have to provision any resources. The fact it will scale to volume automatically is a huge win. * Lambda was a treat to work with. We used it with Python. Both the web console and API interface worked great for us. * I was able to get Lambda development working end-t…

This is such a great comment (polite, constructive, unbiased). It made me think that I wish there was a site like Ars Technica, but for PaaS/IaaS.
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