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

111–120 of 152 posts

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#111

Post by parkersweb »

ranman wrote: post #97
vizzah wrote: post #87

Amazon has invalid 404 links to the tutorial sections on the main page. "This workshop is broken up into five modules." And most of those module links are broken too ;-) Can only be viewed in a step-by-step mode.

Where are the 404s? I'll notify some folks to fix them. I'm not finding any but I'm also on mobile.

Modules in the list at the bottom of this page:

https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/serverless-web-app/

are broken - but the links to the modules at the top of the page work OK.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#112

Post by ranman »

davnicwil wrote: post #90
jaxondu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully we will see AWS release a managed serverless SQL db solution at re:Invent 2017. Like DynamoDB but for SQL.

> Like DynamoDB but for SQL This would basically be the game-changer for building backends on lambda. The absolute key and most valuable piece in most backends is the persistent datastore. I absolutely want to build functional stateless business logic on lambda, but I absolutely will not, no matter the gain from not having to manage servers, have my database be dynamodb or any other non-RDBMS, for any serious applica…

Why not? Plenty of serious companies use DDB or MongoDb or plenty of other databases for their "serious applications"... this seems like a rule based on a bad experience. Would love to hear about it.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#113

Post by voidr »

_m8fo wrote: post #94
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.

It's interesting how most of the responses to this post agree that "serverless" isn't literally what's happening but agree to that name and say to get over it. It's akin to someone saying it's "free" because you don't have to think about the money, e.g. you pay with a credit card. Perhaps the name it should be called is adminless or backend as a service. In any case, there's probably not much one can do about the nam…

Reminds me of the following meme:

#define TRUE FALSE //Happy debugging

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#114

Post by _vufv »

zdkl wrote: post #106
Herald_MJ wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. The Cloud is used to collectively represent all kinds different types of computing/storage/auxiliary services that can be managed on demand.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#115

Post by mgkimsal »

_m8fo wrote: post #94
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.

It's interesting how most of the responses to this post agree that "serverless" isn't literally what's happening but agree to that name and say to get over it. It's akin to someone saying it's "free" because you don't have to think about the money, e.g. you pay with a credit card. Perhaps the name it should be called is adminless or backend as a service. In any case, there's probably not much one can do about the nam…

> Perhaps the name it should be called is adminless or backend as a service

What's odd is that we already have "infrastructure as a service", which is generally what this is. An entire infrastructure to run your code, without having to set it up (although you still need to configure logging to get useful data in most situations, it seems).

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#116

Post by jayair »

It's great that AWS has a tutorial for serverless. Their docs can be a bit hard to get through.

If somebody is looking for an even more comprehensive guide to building full-stack apps with Serverless and React.js, I created http://Serverless-Stack.com.

It's open source and up to date with detailed screenshots and code samples.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#117

Post by Herald_MJ »

voidr wrote: post #110
Herald_MJ wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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', whi…

> It's a useless and confusing marketing buzzword

A marketing buzzword is something like "web scale", which might be used by a non-technical person to describe a technology, but has no real technical meaning. Serverless is not a buzzword because it is the name used for a collection of technologies, even if it isn't a specific product. "Software containers" also falls into this category.

Yes, serverless architectures involve servers. Well done for recognising this, you are very smart. In fact, you are smart enough to realise that the architectures we are talking about here are very distinct from traditional web hosting services. So, it's convenient to use a different name for them.

Finally, it doesn't really matter whether you like the term or not. It is the accepted term and it is here to stay. If you want to engage in conversations on the topic you will need to move past your misgivings.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#118

Post by talkingtab »

Can I absolutely control my cost with AWS? I've read several horror stories about runaway costs for various reasons. Certainly the complexity of AWS, the fragmented nature of the service each of which seems a world unto itself make it hard to understand. Then there was a story about AWS changing a policy that ended up costing users $1000's. ????

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#119

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

Herald_MJ wrote: post #117
voidr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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', whi…

> It's a useless and confusing marketing buzzword A marketing buzzword is something like "web scale", which might be used by a non-technical person to describe a technology, but has no real technical meaning. Serverless is not a buzzword because it is the name used for a collection of technologies, even if it isn't a specific product. "Software containers" also falls into this category. Yes, serverless architectures…

Ad hominem comments are really unnecessary. Your statement "Serverless is not a buzzword because it is the name used for a collection of technologies" is not logically true. There are many buzzwords referring to collections of technologies, and "serveless" is just one of them.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#120

Post by marktangotango »

mgkimsal wrote: post #100
le-mark wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it is very annoying, maybe 'serverless' isn't the best name, but 'adminless' is no better. All the banal comments about the name have really impeded discussion about this topic. I personally am angered at the 'everyone should be a sys admin' culture we've come into as a profession, it completely trivializes the role of sys admins who are critical to any product/company. Good sys admins bring a lot to the tabl…

As with many positions, there's a middle ground. I don't expect people to be able to dive in deep in to the innards of MSSQL and understand all the nuance between types of indexes and how different hardware choices can impact said index types. However, when working with "sr software engineers" who are responsible for SQL, I do expect someone to be able to set up a local test database and create some tables with sampl…

I've seen one team of devs in particular do a really nice job with their sql database, but more often than not dev teams trash their schema and databases, if they're using sql at all. They create rdbs that are not normalized, don't have foreign key constraints, too many indexes (index on every column to get this dashboard query to perform! I've seen this a sad number of times).

Yeah sure sys admins and dbas aren't critical, but if an organization values what they can do, they can multiply the productivity and effectiveness of the app and product teams.

Specifically, features are faster to implement because the schema is not jacked, the app is responsive and stable because the data is normalizesd and indexed for the access patterns, data is consistent. Customers are happy.

Similar for the network/server side for sys admins.

Post reply on HN