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Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#141

Post by isuckatcoding »

jupiter90000 wrote: post #64
gamesbrainiac wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really agree with you on this one, my acquaintances that have actually used this, use it for running bulk jobs that are triggered by S3 changes.

I wanted lambda for a bulk data processing task that would have been a nice use of it, but the 5 minute max on a process wasn't going to work for my use case. Maybe someday I'll find a use for it

Is the task not splittable?

I had to use lambda at work to import files from s3 ranging anywhere from a few megs up to 10-20gb. Ended up using two lambdas (one for creating byte ranges and another for processing those ranges).

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#142

Post by voidr »

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…

> 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.

What collection of technologies does it name? And how is that different from "web scale" technologies that is also a group of technologies?

> Yes, serverless architectures involve servers. Well done for recognising this, you are very smart.

If you would have strong arguments, you wouldn't need snarkiness.

> In fact, you are smart enough to realise that the architectures we are talking about here are very distinct from traditional web hosting services.

That's the exact opposite of what I've said, if you look at it from a server management point of view, traditional web hosting and "serverless" are one and the same, both are used to run the code you upload and both are managed by someone else.

> So, it's convenient to use a different name for them.

It's not convenient, it's confusing.

> Finally, it doesn't really matter whether you like the term or not. It is the accepted term and it is here to stay.

Accepted by who?

> If you want to engage in conversations on the topic you will need to move past your misgivings.

If you want to engage in conversations on any topic with anyone, you should read what's on this website https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ and stop doing them.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#143

Post by kyledrake »

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…

The people that run their own infrastructure long ago realized that holding the key to mass consumption is the key to the control of the web. That's the thing they're all actually competing on. Good luck competing with them on it when they're controlling your rates. Cheap in, expensive out.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#144

Post by ranman »

staofbur wrote: post #137
ranman wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

Ok, if you guys pursue something like this again definitely check out something like storage gateway. It can help reduce the load in a live migration scenario like this.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#145

Post by ranman »

parkersweb wrote: post #111
ranman wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This should be fixed now (shift + refresh)! The links went out missing the "modules" in the path. I think we're going to write a quick lambda function to test for broken links in any post. Anyway, I want to apologize for the poor user experience. We should have caught this!

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#146

Post by kirillzubovsky »

factsaresacred wrote: post #72
kirillzubovsky wrote: post #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 w…

Firebase is fantastic and that's because they built their toolset and UI before being acquired by Google. They recently Google-ified their website but it's still less of a mess than Google cloud console (which feels like navigating a helicopter's dashboard). First impressions matter and I think Firebase nailed it. The website presents the value clearly while also allowing you to get into the weeds if you need to. The…

Agreed. Google cloud console is a mess. In 5 years Firebase acquisition cost would be considered peanuts for the value they've added to Google.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#147

Post by kirillzubovsky »

ranman wrote: post #98
kirillzubovsky wrote: post #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 w…

> It's aimed at the highly skilled developers who would get the concepts in a blink, Do you have any advice on how we could make this stuff more accessible to new developers? When you say the presentation do you mean the overall marketing, the UX, or just the CSS?

All of the above. AWS is the Google Cloud right now, but it's missing the "Firebase" equivalent.

I know a ton of people who have no problem spinning out an EC2 instance to scrape the web for all their needs in a heart beat, and yet I don't know many who just want to make software for people, without all the complexity of setting things up.

Look at Firebase, they have "Authentication", "Database", "Storage", and "Functions". If I want to Auth users into my app, it's quite literally a one line of code. Meanwhile Amazon has "Cognito," which requires setting up identities, rules, connecting it to other AWS services ... head explodes.

That's a small example, but AWS is built for some serious enterprise business, and if you want to make something like Firebase, you need to repackage it all, and dumb it down to a simple use case. Run whatever 265 services are necessary in the background, but give the user 1 thing to worry about.

I fully understand that would be really hard to do, but that's the point. Gotta do the hard thing for the user, and they will come.

As far as UX/css/visual, it's all of it. Like another commenter mentioned, in order to make things pleasant you gotta move away from the AWS style guide and towards something unique and friendly. Right now the entire AWS website look like it's been built in a spare time by a sys admin (because it probably has been).

IMO it's okay to make "AWS Light" a stand-alone offering, like Heroku, but that means you need to commit to maintaining such a service, and from what I hear through the grapevine Amazon is quite happy to be the piping for the internet, without having to run the consumer side of things.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#148

Post by Futurebot »

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.

"Just-in-time server" would have been much more descriptive and accurate as a term.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#149

Post by simplexion »

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…

I think something like "Server-nescient Web Application." Marketing departments should like a fun word like nescient.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#150

Post by ranman »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #147
ranman wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's aimed at the highly skilled developers who would get the concepts in a blink, Do you have any advice on how we could make this stuff more accessible to new developers? When you say the presentation do you mean the overall marketing, the UX, or just the CSS?

All of the above. AWS is the Google Cloud right now, but it's missing the "Firebase" equivalent. I know a ton of people who have no problem spinning out an EC2 instance to scrape the web for all their needs in a heart beat, and yet I don't know many who just want to make software for people, without all the complexity of setting things up. Look at Firebase, they have "Authentication", "Database", "Storage", and "Func…

Thanks for all the insight!

Have you seen lightsail or codestar?

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