Serverless: Cold Start War

#1

Post by kiyanwang » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 5:59 AM UTC

Serverless: Cold Start War
mikhail.io

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#2

Post by catchmeifyoucan » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

This is very well done! I love the comparisons, and the fact that it compares different languages.

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#3

Post by tomcam » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 3:23 AM UTC

One of my favorite articles of recent times. What jumped out at me was that there is a dramatic difference in start up time depending on how much memory your cloud server has: the more memory, the faster the start up time.

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#4

Post by songco » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

Great comparisons

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#5

Post by xrd » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 3:51 AM UTC

I'm still really puzzled why AWS lambda has golang and Azure functions has Java and python but GCF doesn't have anything but JavaScript. That's a big hole that must be leaving a lot of developers feeling frustrated.

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#6

Post by pseudobry » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 3:55 AM UTC

xrd wrote: post #5

I'm still really puzzled why AWS lambda has golang and Azure functions has Java and python but GCF doesn't have anything but JavaScript. That's a big hole that must be leaving a lot of developers feeling frustrated.

GCF support for Python 3 is in beta: https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/concepts/python-runt...

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#7

Post by thomasfoster96 » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 4:03 AM UTC

The comparison of JavaScript cold start times by the number/size of dependencies is a little confusing.

I’m not too familiar with how all the various serverless platforms work, but a decent bundler would surely improve the cold start times of most JavaScript functions. Deploying dozens of megabytes of dependencies across dozens and dozens of files is obviously going to result in a longer start up time than uploading a single bundle generated by webpack or Rollup.

Enforcing a single [0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/writing-workers/st...

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#8

Post by abhisuri97 » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 4:35 AM UTC

Does anyone know a potential reason why .NET shows a clear trend of decreasing cold start time as memory size increases?

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#9

Post by maxxxxx » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 4:38 AM UTC

I think if would be nice to also show the performance after cold start so you can make a real-world comparison with all trade offs.

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#10

Post by xienze » Tue, Sep 11, 2018, 4:39 AM UTC

The whole point of serverless functions is to do work that isn’t necessarily real-time, but of which this is a lot and each unit of work can be completed relatively quickly (say, periodic sync tasks and the like). I really think if the nitty-gritty of cold start behavior is foremost in your mind you’re likely Doing it Wrong(tm).