Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 152 posts

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#101

Post by ranman »

staofbur wrote: post #35
kyledrake wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now I spend $240-600/mo for 192TB of bandwidth. I just used AWS's calculator and they charge $38,876.48/mo for the same thing. I don't subscribe to the theory that this is "the future".

Indeed. It's a big cost escalator. We have split architecture across two DCs we own and AWS. AWS is a bad deal when you get to our size. If we moved our DCs entirely into AWS we would literally triple costs overnight. On top of that, once it's in AWS, a lot of the services that they provide aren't portable. You're stuck and it's expensive to unstick these. The tooling isn't very mature either. You'd be surprised how…

>You'd be surprised how difficult it is moving 22TiB of file storage to S3.

Really? I deal with this daily. Can you email randhunt@amazon.com - if you're genuinely having or had issues moving 22TiB to S3 please LMK as that's abnormal for our customers and I want to fix it for you and others.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#102

Post by IanCal »

etatoby wrote: post #88
melvinram wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called serverless because, for all intents and purposes, you don't know or control: * how many real or virtual servers are running your code. * how the servers were provisioned or setup. * how to access the servers (either via SSH or programmatically), either than through predefined APIs. * what happens when the servers break. * what causes the servers to disappear. * etc. The "server" concept has been abstracte…

We still run and manage our servers and save a metric ton of money wrt. "cloud" offerings. When "cloud" or "serverless" will be cheaper than managing your own dedicated servers, then it will actually be useful. Until then, it's just marketing.

It already is for some of the things I'm doing. I have a lot of data in s3 and process it with lambda, meaning I can run a bunch of things I want very quickly by starting 100+ concurrent processes with virtually no management time from me, and it's cheap.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#103

Post by brianzelip »

techno_modus wrote: post #51
jondubois wrote: post #36

Amazon Lambda is like Microsoft Windows was in its early stages. It's a fast-growing, closed/proprietary system for running apps. I wouldn't be surprised if it achieves a near-monopoly for a while... But I think that eventually more flexible open source solutions will take over. Open platforms like Docker and Kubernetes will likely replace Lambda just as Linux replaced Windows on the server-side.

> Open platforms like Docker and Kubernetes will likely replace Lambda I am not sure if Docker/Kubernetes are comparable with Lambda. But currently there are some attempts to develop an open source alternative to Lambda and other proprietary FaaS (Function as a Service) platforms like OpenWhisk for Cloud Foundry: http://openwhisk.org/

Thanks much for linking openwhisk, good to know about it.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#104

Post by StevePerkins »

Sephr wrote: post #41

Is anyone else slightly peeved by the popularity of this misnomer? If you are paying for servers , your app isn't serverless . Real serverless to me means decentralized p2p and offline apps. I also consider p2p-routed apps with centralized control serverless as long as they continue to function in a read-only state when the control server is down.

I hear you, but to me this is like people getting upset over hoverboards ("But they don't hover!!!"). True, but it's convenient shorthand and pretty much everyone understands what is really meant.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#105

Post by IanCal »

virtualized wrote: post #69
perilunar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just peeved, but confused. "With serverless computing, your application still runs on servers" So it's not serverless? Why are you calling it serverless?

Because server has become a synonym for "Ubuntu pet machine that developers SSH into to paste random commands from Stack Overflow". People who do that are the target audience of "serverless".

Also people with different requirements. I like being able to drop a load of files on s3 and have a few hundred processes start automatically, run and store the results elsewhere without having to ever worry about disk space or managing a fleet of servers which I want running for no more than a couple of minutes.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#106

Post by zdkl »

Herald_MJ wrote: post #83
Sephr wrote: post #41

Is anyone else slightly peeved by the popularity of this misnomer? If you are paying for servers , your app isn't serverless . Real serverless to me means decentralized p2p and offline apps. I also consider p2p-routed apps with centralized control serverless as long as they continue to function in a read-only state when the control server is down.

No, I'm not peeved by the "misnomer". What is getting a bit annoying is every conversation about serverless being dominated by snarky comments about there being no such thing. As software professionals, we all know there is a server involved in responding to requests for our applications. But 'serverless' does accurately describe services like AWS Lambda, because the experience of development is such that you don't r…

> the experience of development is such that you don't really have to think about servers, along with all the complexity of provisioning, configuring and managing them.

But didn't we get "The Cloud" to do that? I mean I'm fine with rebranding but this is a really fine line.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#107

Post by ranman »

williamle8300 wrote: post #5

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.

Disclaimer: I work for AWS

Computing / storage tends to get cheaper - even adjusted for inflation.

AWS has decreased prices 62 times. I'm not aware of a time where their prices increased - (maybe mechanical turk)?

Are you?

In fact I'm not aware of any cloud vendor ratcheting up their prices (I don't consider Oracle a cloud vendor). I've seen misbillings / changing terms on google cloud that resulted, unfortunately, in a few specific types of workloads having increased costs... even then I'm pretty sure they addressed that responsibly... but I'm not aware of any vendor ever increasing costs... only decreasing them... over the past 10 years.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#108

Post by StevePerkins »

jondubois wrote: post #36

Amazon Lambda is like Microsoft Windows was in its early stages. It's a fast-growing, closed/proprietary system for running apps. I wouldn't be surprised if it achieves a near-monopoly for a while... But I think that eventually more flexible open source solutions will take over. Open platforms like Docker and Kubernetes will likely replace Lambda just as Linux replaced Windows on the server-side.

> I wouldn't be surprised if it achieves a near-monopoly for a while...

Are you serious? Every major player in the market has a more or less equivalent offering. They started appearing within weeks of AWS Lambda's launch.

https://cloud.google.com/functions/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/

https://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/openwhisk

There are also a number of open source projects emerging... to support migrating between providers to reduce lock-in, or to roll your own service:

http://openwhisk.incubator.apache.org/

https://github.com/spring-cloud/spring-cloud-function

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#109

Post by ranman »

skyisblue wrote: post #40

Has anyone used Zappa in production? What has your experience been like?

I have and I had no issues. Website had peak load of only a few hundred requests per second and was Zappa running flask. Not sure if you consider that production or not.

Disclaimer: I work for aws

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#110

Post by voidr »

Herald_MJ wrote: post #83
Sephr wrote: post #41

Is anyone else slightly peeved by the popularity of this misnomer? If you are paying for servers , your app isn't serverless . Real serverless to me means decentralized p2p and offline apps. I also consider p2p-routed apps with centralized control serverless as long as they continue to function in a read-only state when the control server is down.

No, I'm not peeved by the "misnomer". What is getting a bit annoying is every conversation about serverless being dominated by snarky comments about there being no such thing. As software professionals, we all know there is a server involved in responding to requests for our applications. But 'serverless' does accurately describe services like AWS Lambda, because the experience of development is such that you don't r…

> But 'serverless' does accurately describe services like AWS Lambda,

Serverless means no server, which is false, because there is a server that runs your code.

> because the experience of development is such that you don't really have to think about servers, along with all the complexity of provisioning, configuring and managing them.

That sounds like you are talking about 'web hosting' or 'application hosting', which existed decades ago, don't see any point in inventing a confusing buzzword when we have perfectly fine terminologies already.

> TL;DR: It's just a name. Get over it.

It's a useless and confusing marketing buzzword that makes having intelligent conversations harder. I would love to understand your rationale for defending this confusing buzzword.

Post reply on HN