31–40 of 110 posts
Would anyone here use it? I can put together a small app in a few days.
And because it's a "Cloud" service, we pay for what we use, so if there's no workload for the functions to service, there's no cost. We just pay for the time the tiny little container is active.
Business: Ok, that sounds like it can save us money, and you seem confident in the technology, let's go with that.
1 Month Later:
Business: Why do all these actions take so much longer to complete? They used to load instantly with a "Done" message, now they're measurably delayed to respond.
Tech: Well, you see the containers that run our functions stop running once they've finished their work and it looks like theres nothing more for them to do, so when new work comes in theres a delay while the container starts.
Business: You mean like how my Dell takes 5 minutes to boot up?
Tech: Well, kind of, but its much quicker than that obviously, and it's not a whole operating system, it's just some processes in a process namespace...
Business:
Tech: Ok, well tell you what we can solve this, we can setup something to periodically ping the system so the containers running our functions don't ever get de-activated, and that way they'll be ready to service requests immediately, all the time.
Business: OK great that sounds like what we want.
1 Month Later:
Finance: Why did our bill for "functions" suddenly spike in the last month, compared to when we started using it?
Tech: Well you see now we have to keep the function containers running 24x7 so they're quick to respond, because $Business complained they're too slow to start up from inactive state.
Tech Onlookers: ..... .... Wat... Why... Why would you do that?
(Edited to add:)
Tech Entrepreneur: I can outsource that process of keeping your function containers active for you, for just $1/container/month!
I think there is a business case for a small app where you could input the url of your function and have it called every ‘x’ seconds or minutes to keep the function warm. Would anyone here use it? I can put together a small app in a few days.
I think there is a business case for a small app where you could input the url of your function and have it called every ‘x’ seconds or minutes to keep the function warm. Would anyone here use it? I can put together a small app in a few days.
I'm still a bit puzzled by the hype around FaaS. It seems like a useful tool for things where you don't want major queuing under pressure, but you can tolerate human perceptible delays. But it also seems easy to build a big ball of mud deeply tied to the nuances of the chosen FaaS provider. It just seems like most use cases are probably going to be just fine with more conventional horizontal scaling techniques. But I…
Koolaid.
Lambda is not useful. It solves a few problems but creates even more new problems. Some problems include: - It makes managing multiple environments (e.g. development, staging, production) almost impossible. - It makes debugging difficult because you can't run the code on your own machine and step through the code. Most projects cannot be tested end-to-end due to environment incompatibilities between different service…
Lambda is not useful. It solves a few problems but creates even more new problems. Some problems include: - It makes managing multiple environments (e.g. development, staging, production) almost impossible. - It makes debugging difficult because you can't run the code on your own machine and step through the code. Most projects cannot be tested end-to-end due to environment incompatibilities between different service…
Doesn't that mostly apply to all serverless platforms? Serverless is cheap and allows cloud providers to use excess capacity to allow small pieces of software to run, scaling almost infinitely[0]. But it is always vendor lock-in, whether you choose Azure or Amazon. It is a propietary platform but that applies for most of the cloud if you use services that don't exist elsewhere (Azure blobs, Azure Cosmos DB, etc) [0]:…
I feel as if the whole "warm up the lamba as a pre-step"-thing takes away from the whole benefit of serverless. I wonder if AWS Lambda could be smart enough to anticipate requests based on some historical or daily pattern. Also, I'd be curious to know if it is still cost effective to use lambda with this technique (pre-warming) or to straight up go for a EC2 instance.
I can see that maybe there is a case to make for using functions as a service, to handle batch processing of things, or possibly to service background API requests.
I'm still a bit puzzled by the hype around FaaS. It seems like a useful tool for things where you don't want major queuing under pressure, but you can tolerate human perceptible delays. But it also seems easy to build a big ball of mud deeply tied to the nuances of the chosen FaaS provider. It just seems like most use cases are probably going to be just fine with more conventional horizontal scaling techniques. But I…
I guess you can. However, when I built Lambda functions I did pay attention to restricting lock-in to the entrypoint, and when I later had to migrate elsewhere for non-technical reasons, that was very much doable. In other words, it's easy but not necessary to build a big ball of locked-in mud.
I feel as if the whole "warm up the lamba as a pre-step"-thing takes away from the whole benefit of serverless. I wonder if AWS Lambda could be smart enough to anticipate requests based on some historical or daily pattern. Also, I'd be curious to know if it is still cost effective to use lambda with this technique (pre-warming) or to straight up go for a EC2 instance.
2. Cloud vendors are working and succeeding to make cold starts faster, and AWS is at the forefront.
3. Pre-warming done right is extremely cheap, you won't pay anything meaningful, just several cents per month.
P.S. I'm the author of OP.