Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
aws.amazon.com
Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
1–10 of 101 posts
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#2Ok, I have seen the phrase "serverless" a few times recently. Can someone explain to me what it is (as I am pretty sure it involves a server - it runs on AWS ffs) and why I should want to use it?
And most importantly, is it web scale?
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#3Ok, I have seen the phrase "serverless" a few times recently. Can someone explain to me what it is (as I am pretty sure it involves a server - it runs on AWS ffs) and why I should want to use it? And most importantly, is it web scale?
It just means you don't have to worry at all about managing the servers, using thing like AWS Lambda which handle it for you. Generally these services will scale up and down for you as well.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#4Ok, I have seen the phrase "serverless" a few times recently. Can someone explain to me what it is (as I am pretty sure it involves a server - it runs on AWS ffs) and why I should want to use it? And most importantly, is it web scale?
It's just marketing hype. As you noted there is no such thing as serverless. It is another architecture that forces you to use AWS Lambda and API gateway and a few other services to glue everything together. The idea being that if you are just shuttling bytes back and forth then the overhead of the traditional deployment is too much and you're better served with what looks like an event bus with some transformers sitting in the middle.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#5Has anyone successfully and painlessly used Lambda+API Gateway in production as their main backend? It appears Lambda has many limitations, but I see rather mature frameworks such as Serverless (formerly JAWS) being promoted here, and now Amazon is also working on their standard framework.
It would be great to just use CDNs and this; get all benefits of using a PaaS with IaaS-level costs only!
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#6AWS Lambda is cool and all, but aren't people doing the math on this? Lambda seems like a really expensive way to deliver almost anything. Likewise, the AWS API Gateway is expensive, but at least provides some additional capabilities. Lambda seems like its profitable niche would be very small; limited computing environment, very high cost (relative to almost every other way to host an API), and having to learn a whole bunch of new APIs and processes to make it all spin.
Am I missing something?
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#7Ok, I have seen the phrase "serverless" a few times recently. Can someone explain to me what it is (as I am pretty sure it involves a server - it runs on AWS ffs) and why I should want to use it? And most importantly, is it web scale?
It means it runs using AWS Lambda and allows access via the API Gateway... it's literally in the second sentence with links to explain what those technologies are.
Lambda's are just units of code that run only On-Demand and without having to manage one or more EC2 instances or a container platform.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#8AWS Lambda is cool and all, but aren't people doing the math on this? Lambda seems like a really expensive way to deliver almost anything. Likewise, the AWS API Gateway is expensive, but at least provides some additional capabilities. Lambda seems like its profitable niche would be very small; limited computing environment, very high cost (relative to almost every other way to host an API), and having to learn a whol…
What makes you say Lambda is more expensive than things like EC2?
Obviously lambda is a hammer, not a swiss army knife - you shouldn't shoehorn it into your app just because it's the new tech on the block. But the use case isn't niche at all.
We're using lambda for our service to ingest and process Hearthstone replays. An HTTP POST is sent to the API gateway, this triggers a lambda which parses a 0.5-2MB file, scrapes the data in it and stores data in the db + converts it to another format. The whole process takes 3-6 seconds. Lambda lets us easily scale to dozens of requests per second without having to worry about anything other than the DB server. Our frontend/app servers don't need to be touched.
The alternative would be to provision and manage a lot of EC2 instances to handle the load. We'd have to worry about provisioning them dynamically so that it's economically viable. We'd have to manage the load balancing ourselves. Lambda's been a huge time saver.
PS: Let it be known that Lambda only supports python 2.7, not python 3, and that really frickin sucks. Get your shit together, Amazon.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#9Ok, I have seen the phrase "serverless" a few times recently. Can someone explain to me what it is (as I am pretty sure it involves a server - it runs on AWS ffs) and why I should want to use it? And most importantly, is it web scale?
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#10Ok, I have seen the phrase "serverless" a few times recently. Can someone explain to me what it is (as I am pretty sure it involves a server - it runs on AWS ffs) and why I should want to use it? And most importantly, is it web scale?
It just means you don't have to worry at all about managing the servers, using thing like AWS Lambda which handle it for you. Generally these services will scale up and down for you as well.
That just worries me all the more. You basically get software engineers that wall themselves into their garden. It's like nodejs all over again...