I love the name. :) Fits right in with "flask" ( http://flask.pocoo.org ) and "bottle" ( http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/index.html ).
Shameless plug: come join over 6200+ of us at https://flask.reddit.com discussing Python and Flask!
Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
41–50 of 101 posts
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#42I think I would have preferred this to be some type of plugin/add-on to Flask rather than a full replacement that now locks me to AWS and is a brand new project without any docs :( If it was a cli with decorators or something that uses Flask I would feel more comfortable and give it a shot.
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Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
That's been the trend in the software industry since about 2000. When I started then, the job description was just "software engineer", and you were expected to know networking, databases, low-level code, UI code, scripting, etc. Now you have "frontend software engineer", "backend software engineer", "full-stack software engineer" (which seems to mean web framework + database, which is a very different meaning from w…
If you don't understand why GOOD startups do this, take a look at the "Doing things that don't scale[1]" lecture from "How to Start a Startup" series by Sam Altman at Stanford.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#44I think I would have preferred this to be some type of plugin/add-on to Flask rather than a full replacement that now locks me to AWS and is a brand new project without any docs :( If it was a cli with decorators or something that uses Flask I would feel more comfortable and give it a shot.
Hopefully the Flask team will whip something like that up.
I also want to see this for Django.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#45I think I would have preferred this to be some type of plugin/add-on to Flask rather than a full replacement that now locks me to AWS and is a brand new project without any docs :( If it was a cli with decorators or something that uses Flask I would feel more comfortable and give it a shot.
I've looked into doing this. Flask is too integrated with the WSGI protocol to be easily adapted to this model. It presupposes a number of things about the request and response protocol that are not true in Lambda. You would end up having to write an unwieldy WSGI emulation layer (what Zappa did) and still wouldn't be able to achieve 100% WSGI compatibility, breaking a subset of the plugins.
Most people love Flask because of its beautiful, minimalistic route decorators and hooks. That subset of the API can be easily replicated - Chalice is part of the way there - and I'm hoping it emerges as an API standard, separate from WSGI.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I think this type of thing will end up being useful for special cases, but in general we'll still want to run our own servers. Their use case of creating a public API is a great one: it's a simple interface and having Lambda handle the auto-scaling is pretty awesome.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#47Ok, 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 an app server. It's like PHP.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#48I think I would have preferred this to be some type of plugin/add-on to Flask rather than a full replacement that now locks me to AWS and is a brand new project without any docs :( If it was a cli with decorators or something that uses Flask I would feel more comfortable and give it a shot.
I definitely wouldn't build a business on this for the reasons you mention, but there are still very good use cases. E.g. let's say you have a website where you need to strip metadata from images. That's only two or three lines of code with Pillow, but it might be better opsec to do it elsewhere so that if your app somehow gets pwned you don't have the metadata flowing through your system. But if doing that involved setting up an entirely new webserver then that probably wouldn't make sense, especially since the new server would probably be subject to the same vulnerabilities as the original.
Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's been the trend in the software industry since about 2000. When I started then, the job description was just "software engineer", and you were expected to know networking, databases, low-level code, UI code, scripting, etc. Now you have "frontend software engineer", "backend software engineer", "full-stack software engineer" (which seems to mean web framework + database, which is a very different meaning from w…
If you don't understand why GOOD startups do this, take a look at the "Doing things that don't scale[1]" lecture from "How to Start a Startup" series by Sam Altman at Stanford. [1] https://clip.mn/video/yt-oQOC-qy-GDY
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Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS
#50I think I would have preferred this to be some type of plugin/add-on to Flask rather than a full replacement that now locks me to AWS and is a brand new project without any docs :( If it was a cli with decorators or something that uses Flask I would feel more comfortable and give it a shot.
I've looked into doing this. Flask is too integrated with the WSGI protocol to be easily adapted to this model. It presupposes a number of things about the request and response protocol that are not true in Lambda. You would end up having to write an unwieldy WSGI emulation layer (what Zappa did) and still wouldn't be able to achieve 100% WSGI compatibility, breaking a subset of the plugins. Most people love Flask be…
You're not wrong, but there are plenty of examples of using Flash without WSGI. I use Flask-Frozen to generate static sites from the CLI, for example.