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Serverless: Cold Start War

mikhail.io

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Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#11

Post by reilly3000 »

abhisuri97 wrote: post #8

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

At least on AWS, increasing memory also comes along with more compute and more networking bandwidth. If there are a lot of packages to be imported and possibly decompressed that could have a large impact

"AWS Lambda allocates CPU power proportional to the memory by using the same ratio as a general purpose Amazon EC2 instance type, such as an M3 type. For example, if you allocate 256 MB memory, your Lambda function will receive twice the CPU share than if you allocated only 128 MB. "

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/resource-model....

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#12

Post by thesandlord »

pseudobry wrote: post #6
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...

GCF support for Golang is coming as well: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/10352785867548139...

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#13

Post by reilly3000 »

xienze wrote: post #10

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).

If you are using serverless functions for something that a user sees, cold start time matters a lot more. Python's Zappa is made for taking Flask/WSGI apps to AWS lambda, and it actually has a configuration option to allow for automatic invocation of functions on a schedule to keep a pool of warm containers.

https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa#keeping-the-server-warm

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#14

Post by iamjustlooking »

I commented on a thread a couple weeks ago about Cloud Functions on GCP here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17796893

Eager to test it out we ran thousands of tests attempts with different RAM sizes and I can corroborate this persons findings in regards to the reduction of cold start time from functions with larger RAM allocations and seeming unpredictability of cold start on GCP. I hope with time they will improve cold start times or increase the minimum time for making a function "cold".

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#15

Post by manigandham »

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.

GCP is just very slow at releasing and behind in both features and services as compared to AWS and Azure. The trade-off is that the GA services are usually more consistent, cheaper, faster and easier to use and integrate.

GCF is still in beta so it's the worst case, but they recently announced Serverless Containers which will let you run anything insider a docker container on-demand. That'll get around the language barriers and is the inevitable destination of all serverless platforms eventually.

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#16

Post by ssijak »

tomcam wrote: post #3

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.

More memory = faster CPU allocated

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#17

Post by ssijak »

xienze wrote: post #10

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).

I`m making a multiplayer game that includes dices using firebase + cloud functions. I must use cloud functions for the game because I can not let the client roll the dices on it`s own and just let it write to firebase, that could be easily cheated. When starting the game, cold starts are very noticeable, but after a few moves, everything feels fine.

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#18

Post by jchrisa »

An alternative approach for user facing apps is to connect directly to the database from the browser. Lambda still has a role to play in such an architecture, but hopefully most of your basic crud operations can go direct, with less commonly called functions like login depending on Lambda. I address this option about 2/3 of the way through this webcast on serverless best practices https://blog.fauna.com/webcast-video-serverless-best-practic...

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#19

Post by alpb »

jchrisa wrote: post #18

An alternative approach for user facing apps is to connect directly to the database from the browser. Lambda still has a role to play in such an architecture, but hopefully most of your basic crud operations can go direct, with less commonly called functions like login depending on Lambda. I address this option about 2/3 of the way through this webcast on serverless best practices https://blog.fauna.com/webcast-video…

Probably worth adding disclaimer you work on FaunaDB. :)

I am wondering in what sort of cases users can just hit the DB. Do you mind giving a tl;dr? Does it only work for readonly/non-sensitive data?

Re: Serverless: Cold Start War

#20

Post by phnofive »

ssijak wrote: post #17
xienze wrote: post #10

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).

I`m making a multiplayer game that includes dices using firebase + cloud functions. I must use cloud functions for the game because I can not let the client roll the dices on it`s own and just let it write to firebase, that could be easily cheated. When starting the game, cold starts are very noticeable, but after a few moves, everything feels fine.

Very cool! Firmly believe no game should ever trust clients. Can you share the project?
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