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Serverless Docker Beta

zeit.co

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Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#41

Post by nickik »

joecot wrote: post #30
akx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you connect to your database over TLS (maybe with an extra client certificate or something), I don't see much of a problem.

As far as protocol is concerned, if you're using TLS, a client certificate, and a strong password, sure, opening your database servers to world accessible should be fine. The problem is that it's possible, and very likely, there are exploits in the wild for your database server -- that are known but you failed to update for a day, or are 0 day exploits -- which are exploitable without having an authenticated account.…

Make a VPN.

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#42

Post by manigandham »

Great announcement.

This development was inevitable, especially since most Functions-as-a-service infrastructure was really docker (or some other) containers running in the background, spinning up on demand using a pool of servers. Azure Container Instances launched last year, and now Google Cloud Functions has serverless containers in alpha, along with the serverless addon for GKE/Kubernetes, and there should be a good bit of announcements this year as other providers follow.

The max time limits still seem pointless to me, there should be an option for unlimited uptime so the full spectrum of ephemeral function to entire app can be managed and deployed using a single flow.

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#44

Post by joecot »

nickik wrote: post #41
joecot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as protocol is concerned, if you're using TLS, a client certificate, and a strong password, sure, opening your database servers to world accessible should be fine. The problem is that it's possible, and very likely, there are exploits in the wild for your database server -- that are known but you failed to update for a day, or are 0 day exploits -- which are exploitable without having an authenticated account.…

Make a VPN.

The problem with just using something like Lambda on a VPC (so you can use a traditional firewall to protect your MySQL server) is that the cold start times are 10-15 seconds, to get your local network interface and connect to the server.

You're suggesting that from the time a user makes a request to the function, the function should load up, and then create a client VPN connection to the database server, and then create a Database connection? Pretty sure that'd end up pushing towards the same cold start time. Also, no managed database provider is going to offer a VPN connection to it, so you're now definitely maintaining your own database server, when part of the point of getting into serverless is to not worry about servers.

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#45

Post by TomMarius »

symlock wrote: post #40
andrewtorkbaker wrote: post #31

And so ZEIT, my favorite serverless provider, keeps getting better. Highlights: - "sub-second cold boot (full round trip) for most workloads" - HTTP/2.0 and websocket support - Tune CPU and memory usage, which means even smoother scaling And all that for any service you can fit in a Docker container - which is also how you get near-perfect dev/prod parity, an often overlooked issue with other serverless deployment te…

I'm not a "serverless hater", but every company I've ever worked with had backend processes that were not tied to HTTP requests. I still keep actual servers around because the HTTP gateway is not the pain point. It's long-running processes, message systems, stream processing, and reporting. That said, I look forward to the company (or side project) where "serverless" can save me from also assuming the "devops" role.

Hello, I'm building a serverless platform. Could you please expand your "It's long-running processes, message systems, stream processing, and reporting" bit?

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#46

Post by rhacker »

symlock wrote: post #40
andrewtorkbaker wrote: post #31

And so ZEIT, my favorite serverless provider, keeps getting better. Highlights: - "sub-second cold boot (full round trip) for most workloads" - HTTP/2.0 and websocket support - Tune CPU and memory usage, which means even smoother scaling And all that for any service you can fit in a Docker container - which is also how you get near-perfect dev/prod parity, an often overlooked issue with other serverless deployment te…

I'm not a "serverless hater", but every company I've ever worked with had backend processes that were not tied to HTTP requests. I still keep actual servers around because the HTTP gateway is not the pain point. It's long-running processes, message systems, stream processing, and reporting. That said, I look forward to the company (or side project) where "serverless" can save me from also assuming the "devops" role.

I think all that is still possible in Serverless. I'm not a serverless architect or anything, but that's typically handled by various serverless queues and related event systems.

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#47

Post by artursapek »

ransom1538 wrote: post #2

Yep. Pretty soon. You write code. You create a docker file. You find a place to run the docker file with your code [cheapest!]. Run it through your tests. Monitor it. The end. No vpcs,salts, puppets, sshs,chefs, horses,anisbles, cats,ec2s,devops,noops, sysadmins, kubernetes or chaos monkeys required.

If you're working on anything with above-average security requirements you will still be managing your entire stack...

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#48

Post by jarym »

some_account wrote: post #32
aequitas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you discover that the thing you are building requires more than a single application running in a single container and you end up building an entire "Operating System" around your containers and the circle starts all over again. Complexity is hardly ever in the solution, but mostly in the problem. Single solutions to complex problems often ignore/forget important parts of the problem and they come back to bite…

I don't know... My experience is the other extreme - tech teams that make everything super complicated to support everything that can possibly happen. As a consequence, the it environment requires six months of experience to even understand. It's really not very fun to work in those environments. Lots of unnecessary complexity.

Yup. I’ve seen this

- customers who insist every package has to be installed in some special place because /opt is ‘reserved’

- have to have non-standard ports for everything because it might slow down attackers

- have to have an Apache proxy in front of everything, always - even internal components. ‘Cos.

- won’t invest in trusted SSL certificates for internal services.

- every sql query has to be wrapped in a stored procedure - no exceptions.

... list goes on

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#49

Post by artursapek »

akx wrote: post #22
watty wrote: post #6

Looks great for basic websites but it's missing the biggest and most difficult piece of cloud infrastructure. The DATABASE! Today you'd have to open up your cloud DB provider to the world since Zeit can't provide a list of IPs to whitelist. This is a showstopper for me unfortunately.

If you connect to your database over TLS (maybe with an extra client certificate or something), I don't see much of a problem.

You don't see a problem with talking to your DB over the public networking, with long round-trips?

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#50

Post by nickjj »

andrewtorkbaker wrote: post #31

And so ZEIT, my favorite serverless provider, keeps getting better. Highlights: - "sub-second cold boot (full round trip) for most workloads" - HTTP/2.0 and websocket support - Tune CPU and memory usage, which means even smoother scaling And all that for any service you can fit in a Docker container - which is also how you get near-perfect dev/prod parity, an often overlooked issue with other serverless deployment te…

I know of 1 large scale web application that is 100% driven by serverless technologies.

The user experience (as an end user using the website) is pretty terrible IMO. It often takes multiple seconds for various areas of the site to load (bound by the network). It's also super Javascript heavy and just doesn't feel good even on a fast desktop workstation.

Authentication is also a nightmare from a UX point of view. Every time I access the site it makes me click through an intermediate auth0 login screen.

I really hope this doesn't become a common trend to run web apps like this. It would make the web nearly unusable.

I'm not a "serverless" hater either. I want technology to move forward to make my life as a developer better. I don't care what tech it is, but right now I just don't get that impression from serverless set ups (both from the developer and end user POV).

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