Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#81

Post by TheHam » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 12:06 AM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #32

I don't think anyone has solved the issues raised in Out of the Tar Pit in the data storage space. We still spend a ton of effort, perhaps more than ever before, wrangling incidental complexity. In 2018, I should be able to define a simple relational schema in 30 seconds and start using it with effectively zero constraints around data access patterns, transaction volume, and data scale, and with no design decisions n…

AWS just release AppSync. You can define a relational GraphQL Schema and hook up to a number of sources to feed data to it. Then, AppSync will automatically turn your schema into a GraphQL API where clients can make queries, mutations, and subscribe to data changes with no constraints regarding data access patterns. Subscriptions scales without any work from you. All of these operations use the relational schema, which is self-documenting. You can change the schema any time you want.

Using the graphQL API requires no knowledge of the backend data store. Therefore, clients and consumers of your API do not need to know about shards, indices, SQL queries, etc.

If you have an existing DynamoDB table, you can automatically generate a GraphQL schema/API from it too.

https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/

disclaimer: i work on aws appsync

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#82

Post by odonnellryan » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 12:17 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #35

I'm a big believer in logging, and I find it hard to believe that collecting and monitoring logs needs to have a server with 32GB of RAM and massive Java and ElasticSearch back-ends like ELK, Splunk, Graylog, or similar monitoring software. I've been searching for something self-hosted that can run in my server's spare capacity and monitor the OS and application logs with a simple searching interface (just a web inte…

Nagios is not-so-easy to configure, but probably will get you most of the way there.

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#83

Post by Blindedwino » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 12:52 AM UTC

odonnellryan wrote: post #82

freehunter wrote: post #35

I'm a big believer in logging, and I find it hard to believe that collecting and monitoring logs needs to have a server with 32GB of RAM and massive Java and ElasticSearch back-ends like ELK, Splunk, Graylog, or similar monitoring software. I've been searching for something self-hosted that can run in my server's spare capacity and monitor the OS and application logs with a simple searching interface (just a web inte…

Nagios is not-so-easy to configure, but probably will get you most of the way there.

Nagios doesn't do log monitoring out of the box though. Unless I've missed that? It definitely doesn't aggregate logs.

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#84

Post by owyn » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 12:59 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #10

An open-source platform for self-hosting function-as-a-service - something that provides the tooling for easily saying "deploy this function, auto scale it, route HTTP traffic to it, now atomically replace it with this new version" without having to lock yourself in to Google/AWS/Azure.

There are a few. flynn.io does this (it's a bit like heroku, using git push as a deployment action and a web ui to manage things). caveat: i hasn't used it...

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#85

Post by Blindedwino » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 1:01 AM UTC

Artemis2 wrote: post #40

freehunter wrote: post #35

I'm a big believer in logging, and I find it hard to believe that collecting and monitoring logs needs to have a server with 32GB of RAM and massive Java and ElasticSearch back-ends like ELK, Splunk, Graylog, or similar monitoring software. I've been searching for something self-hosted that can run in my server's spare capacity and monitor the OS and application logs with a simple searching interface (just a web inte…

oklog might be for you? https://github.com/oklog/oklog It’s still new, but the architecture is sound and it worked well for me on a small single-node deployment (about 30 clients sending logs).

It looks promising. Now if it could integrate easily with syslog-ng/rsyslog, that would be perfect.

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#86

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 1:09 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #10

An open-source platform for self-hosting function-as-a-service - something that provides the tooling for easily saying "deploy this function, auto scale it, route HTTP traffic to it, now atomically replace it with this new version" without having to lock yourself in to Google/AWS/Azure.

There are a lot of these underway at this point. I'm allocated to one (Project Riff). We also like to hear news from our nearest neighbours: Fn, Kubeless, Fission and OpenFaaS.

A lot of what FaaSes give you is a basically a PaaS, with autoscale to zero and preconfigured event sources. If you don't need those -- actually need them -- then you can get away with a bog ordinary PaaS for the time being.

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#87

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 1:13 AM UTC

joshavant wrote: post #71

I'm a front-end developer. I'd like an OSS solution that will allow me to deploy an arbitrary server-side service - be it a Ruby, Python application or even a package like OpenVPN - to some cloud infrastructure, easily. This solution should spin up a hardened OS distro (CIS-compliant, maybe?), provision it with my arbitrary services (using Ansible or Chef or something), and deploy it to AWS or some cloud infrastructu…

There's an overlap with what BOSH does. Starts with a stemcell, compiles your packages against it, spins up whole VMs configured with those packages.

It also adds monitoring for both VMs and processes.

Don't underestimate what you get from a PaaS like Heroku, though. If you're able to stick to 12-factor apps, the lockin is pretty mild -- you should be able to hoist your skirts and move to Cloud Foundry or even OpenShift without too much pain.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we work on BOSH and Cloud Foundry. We compete with Red Hat and Heroku.

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#88

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

trjordan wrote: post #17

10 years ago, I learned about the idea of elastic infrastructure. Services with load balancers in front of them, hosts that come and go easily, a structured way to communicate between services. At the time, that was nginx + manual autoscaling, then it was ELBs and autoscaling groups, now it's kubernetes and containers, maybe hosted. It's still not there. I'm excited about the software that makes that operable at scal…

I suspect this niche will emerge this year.

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#89

Post by mrfusion » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

Even though we have Postgres and MySQL they really don’t seem well configured out of the box and you’ve got to wade through a bunch of settings files and understand what vacuuming is.

I think we need a self tuning rdms. It could watch and adapt to usage patterns and available resources.

Re: Ask HN: Is there server-side software that we are missing in 2018?

#90

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 1:17 AM UTC

ex3ndr wrote: post #41

I really want to simplify writing backend logic and implement everything like functions that reacts on some events and produce another one's. This is a very very looks like, Actor Model (Akka) plus Redux's Reduces: We have just a bunch of a state changing rules and they can be executed reliably and with decent performance. Something very simple (for example for Build Server): Build Failed (Event) -> Assign responsibl…

I'm a one-eyed Concourse fan, which implements a separation of state and logic that allows designs like this. I've been pitching pretty heavily the concept of creating or converging to parity with the FaaS I'm assigned to work on.

So: maybe. We might pull this off.