In the end it's only the web server that is serverless, you still need other servers depending on your use case, and hey, web servers aren't that hard to run anyway.
Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
71–80 of 165 posts
Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
#72Hey all,
My name is Chris Munns and I am currently the lead Developer Advocate for Serverless at AWS (I am part of the Lambda PM team). We really appreciate this feedback and are always looking for ways to hear about these pain points. Can email me directly: munns@amazon.com if you ever get stuck.
Thanks, - Chris
Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
#73Lots of people saying the API gate away is hard.
You don't need to use the API gateway.
Just talk direct to Lambda.
Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
#74I made an image hosting tool on Lambda and S3, for internal corporate use. Staff can upload images to S3 via an SPA. The front end contacts the Lambda service to request a pre-signed S3 upload URL, so the browser can upload directly to S3. It works really well. Observations: 1. Took too long to get something working. The common use case of hooking up a Lambda function to an HTTP endpoint is surprisingly fiddly and ma…
Although I've just started using AWS Lambda and think it's a cool technology to use, I can understand your points. 2) Logging is indeed painful! You definitely need a separate tool/system for that. I have created a small CLI tool to view logs of multiple Lambdas which have been deployed using a CloudFormation template: https://github.com/seeebiii/lambdalogs This does not replace a good external system, but it can hel…
For those using Serverless, being able to upload just the code (not a full Cloudformation stack) is built in, and will save you tons of time. Also, do what you can to limit/optimize your npm modules (if you're using node) since it has to be uploaded every time.
Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
#75It's been great for using as 'glue' to do small tasks like clean ups in our case or other short lived minor tasks. I haven't used it for anything major though, only for minor tasks that are easier or more convenient to do with Lambda rather than a different way. The real value comes from the integration with other AWS services, for example, for developers using DynamoDb Lambdas make a lot of maintenance of records far easier with streams events.
Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
#76A couple of months ago, I've started using AWS Lambda for a side project. The actual functions were pretty easy to code using `nodejs` and deploying them with `serverless` but the boilerplate to opening them via an http API was the real bummer. IAMs, routing and all kind of other little things standing in the way of actual productive work.
Some time after that I tried to setup GCloud Functions and to my surprise that boilerplate was minimal! Write your function and have accessible with just a couple of commands. IMHO GCloud Functions is way more developer friendly and AWS Lambda.
Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
#77- Decouple lambdas with queues and events, SQS, SNS and S3 events are your friends here - Use environment variables - Use step functions to create to create state machines - Deploy using cloudformation templates and serverless framework
Since you can not trigger Lambda with SQS, I don't recommend using Lambda with SQS. You end up having to use some other tool to trigger the Lambda invocation, and polling SQS from there.
Better to use a stream that can trigger Lambdas natively - like SNS or Kinesis.
Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
#78For running Java in Lambda, I had to optimize it for Lambda. To decrease processing time (and in the end the bill), I got rid of all reflection for example and though twice when to initialize what and what to make static. Also, Java Cold Start is an issue. I fixed this with creating a Cloudwatch Trigger that executes the Lambda function every minute to keep it hot. Otherwise, after some minutes of no-one calling the…
If you are triggering it every minute, may I ask how much you are paying for it per month . I have though about it as well as I have a java + spring + Hibernate which takes much too long to start up ; in fact the task execution time is less than the cold start time in my case.
Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
#79Most of my experience mirrors that found in other comments, so here's a few unique quirks I've personally had to work around:
- You can't trigger Lambda off SQS. The best you can do is set up a scheduled lambda and check the queue when kicked off.
- Only one Lambda invocation can occur per Kinesis shard. This makes efficiency and performance of that lambda function very important.
- The triggering of Lambda off Kinesis can sometimes lag behind the actual kinesis pipeline. This is just something that happens, and the best you can do is contact Amazon.
- Python - if you use a package that is namespaced, you'll need to do some magic with the 'site' module to get that package imported.
- Short execution timeouts means you have to go to some ridiculous ends to process long running tasks. Step functions are a hack, not a feature IMO.
- It's already been said, but the API Gateway is shit. Worth repeating.
Long story short, my own personal preference is to simply set up a number of processes running in a group of containers (ECS tasks/services, as one example). You get more control and visibility, at the cost of managing your own VMs and the setup complexity associated with that.
Re: Ask HN: How was your experience with AWS Lambda in production?
#80We had a bad experience: we accidentally made an error in one function that got called a lot, which blocked other functions from runnning. Yay for isolation!