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Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#101

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #14

I have spent the last year and a half building a completely serverless production service on Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB (along with the standard auxiliary services like CW, SNS, Route53, S3, CF, X-Ray, etc.). It was a lot of work establishing new patterns for many of the operational aspects, particularly custom CW metrics and A/B deployments with Lambda traffic shifting, but in the end everything is set up nic…

>We're starting to ramp up traffic now by orders of magnitude (with many more to come) and it's soooooo awesome knowing the stack is pretty much bombproof.

This does come with additional cost. Serverless pricing doesn't scale, your costs increase linearly with your usage, and there're no discounts for bulk usage or reserved pricing.

We were recently on the receiving end of a massive HTTP GET Flood DDoS and although we did not experience any downtime as a result of it, I ended up finding out about it a few days later when billing alarms started going off.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#102

Post by twistedpair »

@ mabl (mabl.com) we've been running a serverless backend on Google Cloud Functions for over a year. It's handled 600M function calls/month without much trouble. Our findings are:

* Eventually you need to promote a function to legitimate service for cost savings (e.g. GCF ️ AppEngine Node service)

• You need a buffer (e.g. GCF outscales services it calls) such as Pub/Sub

• Multi-repo/project layout is best for deployment speed, but needs extra dev/CI tooling to simplify boilerplate

• Minimizing costs can be creative/tricky compared to legacy services

• GCF is great for automatic stats and logging (Stackdriver) and "it just works" configs, compared to Lambda

• Don't go cloud functions everything, just the parts that are a good fit

We've gotten a good uptime using cloud functions, but we're always pushing for more nines. Since the functions tie together a bunch of backend Pub/Sub queues and services/stores, a brief cold start or queue backup has no notable impact on the overall system latency or throughput.

BTW, the coolest feature of AWS Lambda I've found is tying it to SES/SNS for inbound and outbound email routing. I've been running my personal email for years through a Lambda function for a few cents a year.

Overall the space is rapidly evolving and we'll see lots more features on Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, and Google Cloud Functions. See our learnings [1].

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/JosephLust/going-microserverless-...

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#103

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

twistedpair wrote: post #102

@ mabl (mabl.com) we've been running a serverless backend on Google Cloud Functions for over a year. It's handled 600M function calls/month without much trouble. Our findings are: * Eventually you need to promote a function to legitimate service for cost savings (e.g. GCF ️ AppEngine Node service) • You need a buffer (e.g. GCF outscales services it calls) such as Pub/Sub • Multi-repo/project layout is best for deploy…

Any links on how to implement your email routing setup?

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#104

Post by zenovision »

Developing a SaaS product based on completely proprietary stack that you can't even host yourself is VERY dangerous!!! Just yesterday there was a report that twitter bought a company and immediately closed their API access to all customers.

What will you do, if Amazon decide to close your AWS account for some reason? What if they discontinue one of the services you use?

Here is a huge list of products discontinued by Google as example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#105

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

atmosx wrote: post #59
bufferoverflow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you store your state? I assume DynamoDB part isn't serverless.

DDB is serverless in the sense that you don't have to worry about scalability issues, but you have to worry about design issues[1] if you want to take advantage of everything DynamoDB has to offer. I find dynamo's autoscaling very problematic: It's both slow to kick-in and you can scale down 4 times in 24h, not cost-effective if you have spikes. [1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

We got DoS'd with a few hundred million calls over a few days and the dynamodb cost was about $4.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#106

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

cimmanom wrote: post #2

We've shipped something simple and non-mission-critical in production (URL rewriting for ad placements). It has been pretty much set-and-forget. Last anyone had to even look at it was almost 3 years ago, and afaik it's still working (our ad sales team would be complaining loudly if it weren't). For something peripheral like that, it's nice not to have to run servers for it or devote any energy to keeping it running.…

One of the best things we did at ipdata was start using Sentry in our lambda functions. We caught an unbelievable number of silent errors that would've been impossible to find with cloudwatch.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#107

Post by marvin »

segmondy wrote: post #56
jacquesm wrote: post #20

I can't name any names for obvious reasons or give you more hints about what industry this company is in but I just did DD on a very impressive outfit that ran their entire company on Google's cloud platform, it held about 500T of data and held up amazingly well under load. I was super impressed with how they had set this all up and they were extremely well aware of all the limitations and do's and dont's of that par…

There's a big difference between running on GCP and "serverless architecture" Did they have everything running with Google Cloud Functions?

Jacques can absolutely tell the difference between CGP and serverless architecture, so if no more information is forthcoming, it's due to non-disclosure agreements ;)

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#108

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

tbrock wrote: post #32
cimmanom wrote: post #2

We've shipped something simple and non-mission-critical in production (URL rewriting for ad placements). It has been pretty much set-and-forget. Last anyone had to even look at it was almost 3 years ago, and afaik it's still working (our ad sales team would be complaining loudly if it weren't). For something peripheral like that, it's nice not to have to run servers for it or devote any energy to keeping it running.…

Regarding the tooling: I hated debugging Lambdas via CloudWatch logs when using them for Hustle, it drove me to drink. I eventually got upset enough that I made a tool to stream the cloudwatch logs to the terminal and colorize, indent + nicely format json output: https://github.com/TylerBrock/saw

There's also https://github.com/rpgreen/apilogs but I haven't yet gotten it to work.

Cloudwatch feels like it was not made for humans. Searching and filtering for specific log events is a huge pain.

I think one of the best things one could do is to pipe your Cloudwatch logs to an ElasticSearch cluster.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#109

Post by hellofunk »

Anyone have a recommendation how to get started with AWS serverless options? There are so many AWS services and it isn’t intuitive when you login and see all the stuff you can do. Coming from Heroku where you do it all yourself, knowing when and how to break up functionality among AWS tools is not always clear.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#110

Post by gizmodo59 »

jonathan-kosgei wrote: post #103
twistedpair wrote: post #102

@ mabl (mabl.com) we've been running a serverless backend on Google Cloud Functions for over a year. It's handled 600M function calls/month without much trouble. Our findings are: * Eventually you need to promote a function to legitimate service for cost savings (e.g. GCF ️ AppEngine Node service) • You need a buffer (e.g. GCF outscales services it calls) such as Pub/Sub • Multi-repo/project layout is best for deploy…

Any links on how to implement your email routing setup?

You just have to verify your email address in SES (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/verify...) and then you can use SES to send emails on your behalf. You might also want to send a support ticket to get you out of their sandbox environment as it has a lot of restrictions. And then its very simple with Boto3 for example: https://pastebin.com/raw/hC6ihZZx
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