Going Serverless: Migrating an Express App to AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda

Post by dx034 » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 8:12 AM UTC

jasoncchild wrote: post #22

jomamaxx wrote: post #3

Listen folks - it's still a fantasy. Latency is still 5s on many requests = no deal. This has been going on for years. Would someone form AMZ please stand up? I suggest that the latency is 5s for the 'first call', then, subsequent calls are fast - and if you don't use your lambda for a minute or so, it goes back to having latency. I suggest maybe this has something to do with loading it into memory when it's used? Th…

If you are serving high traffic then what's the problem? If your product has only occasional use then you trade cost for latency; spin up an ec2 instance if your request times exceed a few minutes call

Post by badminton1 » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 8:41 AM UTC

blowski wrote: post #70

badminton1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write code to run on? a server.

Call it whatever you want, but I like to use the language of those who hold the purse-strings. If they call it "serverless", then I call it "serverless". If delivering a lecture about why it's not really serverless improves your product, then go ahead and deliver that lecture, but I doubt it will.

Post by lucaspiller » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 8:53 AM UTC

halmor wrote: post #67

I am currently using AWS API Gateway + Lambda for the serverless backend of a social traveling startup. It is absolutely awesome: we are few people in IT and it is amazingly simple to manage the whole stuff. Moreover imho they are mature services at this time, they are flexible enough with enough configuration properties to fulfill a nearly full control of the development experience.

Post by pmontra » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 8:56 AM UTC

jotto wrote: post #26

gjolund wrote: post #11

I love lambda's, but api gateway was far from mature the last time I used it (6 months ago). Unless they have made serious updates to the deployment workflow, feature set, and documentation I would not recommend building your products on it.

The "0 to 1" workflow right out of AWS could not be easier, they have an in-browser code editor with a hello world already written for you. But that workflow doesn't make sense for real dev teams. So there's https://github.com/serverless/serverless . It's driven by a yaml file and is intuitive. The only thing I'm bothered by is lack of environment variables (have to hard code them) and terrible API Gateway latency -…

Post by pmontra » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 9:20 AM UTC

Everhusk wrote: post #41

I'm always surprised at the lack of discussion around database connection reuse with AWS Lambda. It's a pretty big deal that every single API call requires a new database connection. The only solutions I've seen so far are to run a separate app to interface with the database, or moving the connection outside of the handler (which still has issues). Am I missing something or is everyone just really happy to use Dynamo…

    const AWS = require("aws-sdk");
    const docClient = new AWS.DynamoDB.DocumentClient();
    module.exports.theFunction = (event, context, callback) => {
      var params = {
        TableName: "table",
        Item: {
            "attribute": "value"
        }
      };
      docClient.put(params, function (err, data) {
        ...
      });
      callback(null, {...});
    };