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AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

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Re: AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

#51

Post by manigandham »

fapjacks wrote: post #9

Cloud commoditized datacenters. People then tightly coupled their applications to cloud providers like AWS. After some time, containers came along and commoditized the cloud providers. Those applications no longer needed to be tightly coupled to a specific cloud provider. This reduced both costs and the risk of being invested in a single cloud provider. Serverless (AWS Lambda) is just the cloud's way of trying to "de…

Serverless is nothing more than PaaS - just at a more granular deployment/operation/billing/analytics scale. PaaS has always had a certain amount of lock-in because it's an abstraction, as any abstraction naturally does.

There are also some abstractions like Kubernetes that are neutral yet also managed with extras by all the providers which is a nice middle ground.

None of this is new or groundbreaking other than the silly hype words like "serverless".

Re: AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

#52

Post by bthornbury »

reactivesearch wrote: post #48
bthornbury wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might as well throw away the automobiles and go back to horses, they're cheaper on gas. Forget that they take more time to care for, and to learn how to ride, and how to feed properly.

I think this is a bad analogy. Containers don't reduce convenience by a significant factor. On the other hand, what you are suggesting ...

It's straightforward logic.

Serverless platforms increase convenience.

Throwing them away decreases convenience and increases developer time to learn and launch.

Many great inventions, like writing, automobiles, all increased convenience.

Throwing away inventions that increase convenience, decreases convenience.

Re: AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

#53

Post by roywiggins »

nine_k wrote: post #50

I keep being dazzled how what's basically "cloud CGI" is such a runaway success. Utter simplicity beats many considerations. (For those who did not write web apps in 1990s: CGI here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface )

It certainly does seem a throwback to old managed PHP environments. No need to set anything up, just provide your PHP code over FTP and off you go!

Re: AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

#55

Post by electricEmu »

djhworld wrote: post #29
fapjacks wrote: post #9

Cloud commoditized datacenters. People then tightly coupled their applications to cloud providers like AWS. After some time, containers came along and commoditized the cloud providers. Those applications no longer needed to be tightly coupled to a specific cloud provider. This reduced both costs and the risk of being invested in a single cloud provider. Serverless (AWS Lambda) is just the cloud's way of trying to "de…

AWS Lambda itself isn't vendor lock in. If you write your Lambda function to put the interaction between the AWS Lambda service at the surface level of your application (i.e. the entry/exit point), and then write your business logic inbetween, you can create a function that is quite easily tranferrable between cloud providers. The vendor lock in creeps in more around the surrounding services that the cloud provider o…

Why would I split, write, and deploy an vendor cloud function for every cloud provider when Docker moves between them?

My team ditched serverless functions. We're better off without them.

Re: AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

#56

Post by cdnsteve »

fapjacks wrote: post #9

Cloud commoditized datacenters. People then tightly coupled their applications to cloud providers like AWS. After some time, containers came along and commoditized the cloud providers. Those applications no longer needed to be tightly coupled to a specific cloud provider. This reduced both costs and the risk of being invested in a single cloud provider. Serverless (AWS Lambda) is just the cloud's way of trying to "de…

I suggest you take a look at https://www.openfaas.com/

Re: AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

#57

Post by braderhart »

bthornbury wrote: post #52
reactivesearch wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bad analogy. Containers don't reduce convenience by a significant factor. On the other hand, what you are suggesting ...

It's straightforward logic. Serverless platforms increase convenience. Throwing them away decreases convenience and increases developer time to learn and launch. Many great inventions, like writing, automobiles, all increased convenience. Throwing away inventions that increase convenience, decreases convenience.

Serverless in this context is merely a product by AWS. What great inventions do you think that Amazon created here, because serverless is just a word? Do you think that creating a buzzword like Amazon is the same as the science involved in creating an automobile?

Re: AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

#58

Post by electricEmu »

staticassertion wrote: post #27
fapjacks wrote: post #9

Cloud commoditized datacenters. People then tightly coupled their applications to cloud providers like AWS. After some time, containers came along and commoditized the cloud providers. Those applications no longer needed to be tightly coupled to a specific cloud provider. This reduced both costs and the risk of being invested in a single cloud provider. Serverless (AWS Lambda) is just the cloud's way of trying to "de…

I just don't get the "lambda locks you in" thing. You write a server the same way you always would, but like an extra 50LOC exists to make it work on lambda. So if I wanted to deploy elsewhere what would the big deal be? Lambda also provides a lot more than containerized services, as the article mentions - I no longer have to patch my system, which is a huge operational/ security burden that many companies struggle w…

Why functions over Docker or Elastic Beanstalk? There's more than one PaaS path.

On vendor lock-in, I'm moving between clouds now. Serverless did not translate well at all. We would have saved a ton of time, and frankly had an easier operational experience, if we went with Docker from be beginning.

"Ok Jill, next we need to determine how Azure Storage Account bucket calls differ from AWS S3. Oh, S3 doesn't have queues so we need to use SNS which changes the transaction model...Yeah, we've gotta handle different guarantees"

Product at most places "doesn't have the time" for developers to abstract the serverless hooks. You have to change the interface that runs your app instead.of the interface your app provides.

Re: AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

#59

Post by braderhart »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #12
idbehold wrote: post #5

You know what would be better than a .zip? A .tar.gz file. Zip files cannot be unzipped without having the whole thing in memory. What's funny is that the Lambda environments (at least for Node) do not have the `zip` executable available which means that to zip/unzip something inside Lambda I need one written in javascript which has to be included in the zip file I upload to AWS instead of being able to use the nativ…

.tar.gz sucks on Windows though (even 7-zip is a two step process).

The problem though is that Windows sucks, not 7-zip. You are just using a crappy closed-source spyware OS.

Re: AWS Lambda and .zip is a recipe for serverless success

#60

Post by alexcroox »

repsilat wrote: post #25
alexcroox wrote: post #3

I actually find zipping and uploading manually a PITA. Started using the Serverless framework [1] recently and now I just run `serverless deploy --stage dev --aws-profile profilename` from my repo (which is an npm script). [1] https://serverless.com/

Why would you do it manually? Write a two-line script to do it. Downloading a framework to run an npm script that does the equivalent of running `zip` followed by `scp` (or `aws s3 cp` or whatever) seems crazy to me.

The framework handles the setup and management of versions and resources for me. Uploading is a small but relevant part of it.
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