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Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

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Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#131

Post by JoeAltmaier »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #130
etatoby wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience a dedicated server will be cheaper most of the time. I'm using Hetzner for most of my customers (small & medium-size companies) and for several services offered by Amazon a dedicated solution is just cheaper. I always calculate the prices beforehand for several scenarios and self hosting scenarios are almost invariably cheaper (storage, computing etc.). This does NOT mean it's better. Hetzner's serve…

Marginally cheaper? In the statistical sense - each one is physically cheaper. But if you count managing them yourself, backing them up, fixing them when they break? Count the room they take in your house/office? If you have enough, count the salary of the person hired to install/manage them as you expand?

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#132

Post by zdkl »

_vufv wrote: post #114
zdkl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Notice how you didn't use the term server to describe "The Cloud"

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#134

Post by noway421 »

talkingtab wrote: post #118

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. ????

AWS has pricing alerts so you can set limits to specific resources and it will notify you when it tips over. Not that it cuts off the service, you'll still be incurring charges, but at least you can know straight away that something happened.

There's free tier as well if you want to just try out without commitment

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#135

Post by noway421 »

jaxondu wrote: post #57
buckbova wrote: post #8

Has anyone used RDS from lambda? Don't want to use Dynamo but perhaps for some key Val store.

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

There's Aurora which has scalable read replicas.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#136

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #131
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience a dedicated server will be cheaper most of the time. I'm using Hetzner for most of my customers (small & medium-size companies) and for several services offered by Amazon a dedicated solution is just cheaper. I always calculate the prices beforehand for several scenarios and self hosting scenarios are almost invariably cheaper (storage, computing etc.). This does NOT mean it's better. Hetzner's serve…

Marginally cheaper? In the statistical sense - each one is physically cheaper. But if you count managing them yourself, backing them up, fixing them when they break? Count the room they take in your house/office? If you have enough, count the salary of the person hired to install/manage them as you expand?

My experience is that you need a competent person in each case - whether the data is stored in S3 or on a dedicated server, whether you use EC2 instances or doing the job on your own server. For something like 40€/month you get Core i7, 32 GB RAM, 2x4TB HDDs, 1 GBps port and 30 TB included. In this 40€ the cost of storing the server, cooling it, power, etc. is included: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex41 When things break, they repair it. In my case, they usually break once a year - sometimes the PSU, sometimes a hard drive (no a problem with RAID 1 already in place). It all depends on your needs.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#137

Post by staofbur »

ranman wrote: post #101
staofbur wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks have passed your details on to our expert in this space.

For the public record this was mainly down to the problem of client reliability and migrating data live when there are 8,000 people hammering it with reads and writes. We went for a read/write through system and background synchronisation. The latter we had real reliability problems with and the upload performance wasn't great.

Also ROI didn't stack up in the end versus our SAN so we canned it.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#138

Post by jondubois »

StevePerkins wrote: post #108
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 emergi…

Just because these others exist doesn't mean that Lambda cannot be a monopoly. Minix was around when Windows had a monopoly, but Minix never had any meaningful market share.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#139

Post by jondubois »

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/

True, not directly. So it's not as clean a comparison as Windows vs Linux so I meant it more in terms of the ability of one to replace/supersede the other.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#140

Post by sriram_iyengar »

watter wrote: post #91
kagx wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> api gateway typically does not introduce latencies I haven't checked my function thoroughly yet, but I think API gateway introduce quite a bit of latency (at least in my case). My maximum invocation time is 600ms, according to AWS Lambda monitoring tool, but network request takes around 1s (checked in chrome dev tools). Also, worht noting is that my code is hosted in the us-east region and I'm based in Europe. I'm…

Probably about 100ms or more on each request (to and from). Slower depending on location and network conditions.

Yes very much possible if you are requesting across zones. I did extensive testing within zone and couldn't notice anything more than 2-3ms.
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