Serverless Best Practices • Hacker News Board

Re: Serverless Best Practices

#101

Post by ActVen » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #2

I still don’t understand how you do a PostgreSQL insert on a serverless system—please help! Also, this statement is patently silly: > The biggest point to make here is that serverless architecture may well require you to rethink your data layer. That’s not the fault of serverless. Well, it is the fault of serverless. It’s a shortcoming. Own it. The trade off may we be worthwhile, I just can’t tell yet. I’m trying to…

We use lambda functions(node with pg) to process incoming data. We just connect them to Aurora(Postgres) and make the inserts. We have never had any problem with the process whether we are pulling from a queue or other data source.

Re: Serverless Best Practices

#102

Post by k__ » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #94

k__ wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having to set up and maintain your own web/app/db-servers is quiet a nice thing to have, especially for small companies that don't have much money.

True and that’s completely orthogonal to Serverless. Use RDS for DB servers and just use Elastic Beanstalk. It takes most of the complexity out of deploying load balanced web servers. Serverless for app servers is sometimes fine if you don’t need real time responsiveness like working with queues.

Yes, I probably wouldn't use FaaS stuff like Lambda for an API, but AppSync.

Re: Serverless Best Practices

#103

Post by lostcolony » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 4:45 PM UTC

krn wrote: post #90

lostcolony wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you plan on accessing object storage in AWS (S3) from your code without also using IAM to authenticate/authorize requests to it?

I prefer to use object storage powered by OpenStack Swift[1], which makes my application not attached to any proprietary API. [1] https://www.ovh.com/world/public-cloud/storage/object-storag...

There ya go then. Like I said; you're eschewing leveraging -any- managed service cloud providers give you, and instead just use bare VMs, and relying on cobbling together open source stuff, that you have to manage yourself, to build a solution. That's fine for those who have that kind of time, but some of us want to build things and push as many things onto the cloud provider as possible, so we don't have to deal with them.

I like having out of the box authentication with Cognito, out of the box DBs with RDS and Dynamo, out of the box object storage with S3, Serverless as an option with the API Gateway and Lambda...and I'll worry about vendor lockin when Amazon ups the price of an AWS service.

Re: Serverless Best Practices

#104

Post by krn » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 4:48 AM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #103

krn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer to use object storage powered by OpenStack Swift[1], which makes my application not attached to any proprietary API. [1] https://www.ovh.com/world/public-cloud/storage/object-storag...

There ya go then. Like I said; you're eschewing leveraging -any- managed service cloud providers give you, and instead just use bare VMs, and relying on cobbling together open source stuff, that you have to manage yourself, to build a solution. That's fine for those who have that kind of time, but some of us want to build things and push as many things onto the cloud provider as possible, so we don't have to deal wit…

You are right, I prefer highly scalable and proven in production open-source tools, such as Redis and Postgres, to managed services by some cloud provider. It comes as very little overhead, if you pick the right tools and master them, then re-use.

But I understand your point about just connecting a bunch of APIs and being done with it, if you personally don't own the product, or if you are expecting to sell it soon.

A nitpick: I don't host my own object storage, I just pick S3 alternatives that provide standard APIs to access them.