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

Post by jonathan-kosgei » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 11:45 AM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #85

mabbo wrote: post #48

Just the opposite of serious for me. Example: there's a website for all the weather radar stations in Canada that lets you see the last two hours of 10-minute radar snapshots. I wanted a dump of them to try some ML algorithms, but even after requests and emails there simply wasn't one. So I set up a lambda to run every hour, load the website for all 31 weather stations and save all 6 images from the last hour to S3.…

I use a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian for things like these. It's a really cheap one-time cost (ignoring power costs, which are fairly minor), and you can setup all sorts of things on it. If you don't need high availability, running a small system at home can often be a good solution. The initial learning curve for running your own system is a bit higher, but I think it's well worth learning. Once you have the system up…

Post by k__ » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 11:52 AM UTC

jonathan-kosgei wrote: post #101

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 w…

Post by twelve40 » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 11:58 AM UTC

marvin wrote: post #107

segmondy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

Post by jonathan-kosgei » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 12:05 PM UTC

BillinghamJ wrote: post #95

Yes. We use both Lambda and Lambda@Edge, but for different reasons. Virtually all async processing we do is achieved by the main service (running as a normal microservice - no serverless stuff) pushing into an SQS queue, then a Lambda function running every minute pulls from the queue to e.g. report policies to our underwriters, issue policy documents, capture payments, etc. Essentially anything which happens after t…

Post by jonathan-kosgei » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 12:08 PM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #88

Never done any API/HTTP stuff with lambda, but I've built many ETL pipelines using it. A few years ago we tried the Kinesis -> Lambda thing, but it failed during a large traffic event. This was due to the way the Kinesis poller works, and was made worse by the fact that we had two lambdas running off the same Kinesis stream. The main issue was you can't control the Kinesis poller - meaning we ran into resource conten…