Serverless computing on DC/OS with Galactic Fog • Hacker News Board

Re: Serverless computing on DC/OS with Galactic Fog

#21

Post by runeks » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

markonen wrote: post #2

In my book, the innovation in Lambda is, above everything else, about the billing model. My company moved the work of 40 dedicated servers onto Lambda and in doing so decimated our costs. Paying for 1500 cores (our current AWS limit) in 100ms increments has been a game changer. I'm sure there are upsides to adopting the same programming model with your own hardware or VMs, but the financial benefit of Lambda will not…

I wonder why Google Compute charges a minimum of ten minutes to spin up an instance. I understand there is some setup cost, but ten minutes is $0.00056 for the cheapest (f1-micro) instance [1]. I know this sounds sort of cheap, but that's the cost just to deliver the interface (the VM) that is going to be used. That's a relatively large amount of money to spend on not having any work done at all yet. A diskless VM, which can just send data for storage to a database over HTTP, shouldn't require much setup work, as it really just is the execution of CPU instructions (with the OS being the CPU interface rather than JavaScript).

Couldn't someone write a virtualized VM that runs inside Lambda, thus providing zero (or Lambda-equivalent) startup costs for generic VMs? Then the VM would just be a function running inside Lambda, transforming incoming user data and then storing the result in a database, after which it would disappear.

Or maybe the OS just is the problem? One model of bypassing it is Lambda-like services, which would be the more centralized solution, while the more decentralized solution (of the two) would be bare metal/unikernels, which basically achieve the same thing: (close to) zero startup time/cost (~30 ms for a HaLVM unikernel).

[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#billingmodel

Re: Serverless computing on DC/OS with Galactic Fog

#22

Post by crispywalrus » Fri, Jul 22, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

tobilg wrote: post #19

the_arun wrote: post #17

If we want to replace AWS Lambda with self hosted service for Java, what are the recommendations? Apache Mesos ?

Actually, Galactic Fog runs on DC/OS which is at it's core a Mesos distribution. As far as I understood it can't currently run Java lambdas...

So their docs seem pretty clear that their lambda engine runs jvm based languages. Or at least java and scala, but if you can run java you can run scala and clojure and jruby etc.

Re: Serverless computing on DC/OS with Galactic Fog

#23

Post by superuser2 » Sat, Jul 23, 2016, 2:53 AM UTC

markonen wrote: post #2

In my book, the innovation in Lambda is, above everything else, about the billing model. My company moved the work of 40 dedicated servers onto Lambda and in doing so decimated our costs. Paying for 1500 cores (our current AWS limit) in 100ms increments has been a game changer. I'm sure there are upsides to adopting the same programming model with your own hardware or VMs, but the financial benefit of Lambda will not…

Wasn't this the very earliest billing model in multiuser computing? Give us a program to run on our big iron, we charge you for the CPU time it consumes?

This is how university supercomputers work currently. You don't get dedicated hosts; your project has a budget of CPU hours.

Re: Serverless computing on DC/OS with Galactic Fog

#24

Post by treeder » Wed, Jul 27, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

markonen wrote: post #2

In my book, the innovation in Lambda is, above everything else, about the billing model. My company moved the work of 40 dedicated servers onto Lambda and in doing so decimated our costs. Paying for 1500 cores (our current AWS limit) in 100ms increments has been a game changer. I'm sure there are upsides to adopting the same programming model with your own hardware or VMs, but the financial benefit of Lambda will not…

I talk about cost being the main factor in this post about the benefits of Serverless. It's definitely the driving factor: https://www.iron.io/what-is-serverless-computing/