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Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

aws.amazon.com

21–30 of 152 posts

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#21

Amazon wants to control markets by leading in with "convenience" factor but they will sheist you. Buy stuff from Amazon... but for Pete's sake don't make them a core project dependency for your software projects. You only have yourself to blame when they start ratcheting up their prices.

I've used AWS since pretty much the first year they offered EC2 instances, and in that time, I believe their costs have only gone DOWN over the years.

Not just EC2 - we use S3, Glacier, Elastic Beanstalk, IoT, DynamoDB, RDS, Lambda, VPC, CloudFront, CloudWatch, Polly, Rekognition ... and I don't think I have ever seen a price increase /hr or /Gb in all that time.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#23
In principle I really like this way of developing, and especially prototyping, but as it stands right now Google is doing a significantly better job with their tools than Amazon.

Amazon got the same guts, but their presentation of these tools is horrendous. It's aimed at the highly skilled developers who would get the concepts in a blink, with the only problem that these are the same people who can spin out servers with more pleasure and probably in the same amount of time.

Google meanwhile, with their purchase of Firebase, makes some really appealing tools that are not just easy to use, but also easy to understand. Besides, their dev outreach is quite stunning, and so is the email support.

Would love to see Amazon compete, but they have a long road ahead.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#24
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just silly. The internet was supposed to have no single point of failure. Now the Big Five have centralized everything. Why do you need to build centralized services on giant AWS server farms?

Unfortunately life and economics have no concern about the initial intent of anything, only the current utility. Systems, at scale, especially when run by biological processes (read: all man-made systems), have a tendency to centralize. Economies of scale dictate that this is just more efficient. We don't have to do anything. The "evolutionary reward" (i.e. your business thrives and moves quickly) of building on AWS…

>The "evolutionary reward" (i.e. your business thrives and moves quickly) of building on AWS far exceeds SPOF issues for small, medium, and most large players.

Very well put. Couldn't agree more.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That future is being created, you're probably just less aware of it than you think. Serverlessconf just announced their NYC conference, expected to be the largest yet. If Austin is any indicator, it will be huge. [1] Tim Wagner at AWS likes to spout the stat that billions of financial trades are already being processed per day on AWS Lambda. The "serverless" market is gigantic and growing rapidly. And then there's co…

Oh, I know it exists, and I know tons of people are using it. But like I said, I don't think that the tooling is there right now for mass migration (or anything like it). It's really difficult to test/debug. It's difficult to dianose issues. It's difficult to even set up a "Hello World" API Gateway that uses lambdas. It's painful... as are all new technoligies. I guess what I mean to say is: I look forward when I jus…

Not trying to be spammy here, but I want there to be awareness that there are startups working on tools to address these gaps. Our startup, IOpipe[1] is working on one set of tools to ease development, debugging, and instrumentation for serverless applications. Aside from Stdlib and ourselves, there are others working in areas like security and CI/CD as well. These are early days, and tools will soon become abundant, but at least there are a handful to try out today.

[1] - https://iopipe.com

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#26

Amazon wants to control markets by leading in with "convenience" factor but they will sheist you. Buy stuff from Amazon... but for Pete's sake don't make them a core project dependency for your software projects. You only have yourself to blame when they start ratcheting up their prices.

Does that mean I shouldn't buy a car because they might decide to raise gas prices?

You might buy an EV because ICEs are worse for the planet.

Point being, you have a problem that needs solved (transportation, cloud hosting). You can pick options which mitigate downsides imposed by your personal values (environmentalism, cloud vendor lockin). You don't have to stop driving.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#30
- watchout for latencies (multi-zones apps) time of your lambda functions.

- keep your lambda functions warmed up

- node has better warmup time than java lambdas (not sure of python)

- memory size impact of lambda functions (negligible in most cases)

- manage lambda timeouts

- dynamodb latencies are negligible

- api gateway typically does not introduce latencies

- multitenancy challenges with single store of dynamodb

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