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A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

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Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#161

Post by scarface74 »

rumanator wrote: post #155
scarface74 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your “proof” is an anecdote that was easily disproven by a link. If it takes your developers two weeks to host an API in a Lambda when I showed you a link on how simple it is. It says more about your developers than AWS. My time is far from cheap and any time that we can spend letting someone else do the grunt work is valuable.

> Your “proof” is an anecdote that was easily disproven by a link. Real-world problems don't go away when you try to brush them aside. You either face the facts or remain in fantasy land. > If it takes your developers two weeks to host an API in a Lambda Please don't put words in other people's mouths. You have absolutely no idea about what the problems were and already made it quite clear that you don't care about f…

I’m going by the only facts that you offered. You said that it took your developers two weeks to do something that should only take an hour. I showed you an example of how to host a standard API or website within lambda with minimum effort.

If your developer haven’t come up with processes to efficiently manage their development and deployment processes - it’s a process issue that others have already solved.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#162

Post by arkanciscan »

petercooper wrote: post #144
rahuldottech wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's a really dumb term. > Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server ...so, there is a server? What's with the name, then?

I don't get the faux-naivety over the term "serverless". Most modern cars have "keyless" unlocking and ignition, yet.. you still need a key present. You just don't have to think about or manipulate the key. Serverless is much the same.

It's like people who hold up snowballs and say there's no global warming.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#163

Post by scarface74 »

abjKT26nO8 wrote: post #132
corobo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that "I don't even get what the word is supposed to mean" is someone's first experience with tech fear. In my experience (including my own personal anecdata) they tend to mean "I don't want to learn this new thing and because of that I'm worried I'll be left behind if everyone switches to this"

As I wrote in another comment, there is a world of software outside of web development. And I'm not especially fearful of being left behind. I spend almost all my free time learning new things. But I wouldn't really jump at the opportunity of learning something that locks me into a single company's services. Learning the fundamentals of computers seems like a much better use of my time.

Because after you have “learned the fundamentals” it takes a lot longer to “learn” how to write a function that takes in two parameters, zip it up with all of your dependencies and upload it....

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#164

Post by e12e »

tuldia wrote: post #54
abjKT26nO8 wrote: post #5

I don't know anything about serverless --- to this day I fail to understand what this word is even supposed to mean. And the deployment diagram[1] sure looks complicated to me. I think I prefer old-school servers. [1]: " rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0x4447/0x4447-product-s3-e...

Indeed. I suspect the "serverless" word was created due to the emotional appeal to a specific (majority) group that is strongly opinionated against having servers at all. Reading from the README.md file: There are two major limitations with SES: For security reasons, AWS defaults to 200 emails sent per 24 hour period at a rate of 1 email/second. If you need to send more than that, you'll need to ask AWS to increase y…

I find these absurdly limited mail services strange. The one time I had to craft some "extra" email, was sending out surveys to an opt-in group for an EU project. There were some 10 000 recipients, and we had to send each a different email, in order to link responders with surveys (ie: a template email with description and an unique url of the form https://example.com/survey/123xyz).

Generating the emails in a naive loop and sending them via python took an insignificant amount of time - but in the end we worked out doing batches of 2000 at a time was easy enough - and with some help from the college that ran the email service (via exim) it all worked out (if you're going to send 10k mails in a day, it's nice to give your postmaster a heads up).

Hosting the mail server ourselves (using eg exim or postfix) would've worked too. Not sure about any of the spam-as-a-http-api services - even with custom domains they tend to have poor reputation, and they have these silly limits that mean they're not only not "auto scaling" - they're very low performance.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#165

Post by bathtub365 »

anonu wrote: post #47
abjKT26nO8 wrote: post #5

I don't know anything about serverless --- to this day I fail to understand what this word is even supposed to mean. And the deployment diagram[1] sure looks complicated to me. I think I prefer old-school servers. [1]: " rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0x4447/0x4447-product-s3-e...

Serverless is beautiful. You just need to try some basic serverless concepts. Like run a website on S3. But to your second point, I agree. the technical hurdle required to learn all the configuration and moving parts ... And then to know that this language is vendor specific... Makes it less palatable. That's why I expect the cloud vendors to normalize their offerings over time. I should be able to take a CloudFormat…

How is running a website on S3 different from uploading your website to a shared hosting provider 20 years ago? How is it “beautiful”?

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#166

Post by c-cube »

scarface74 wrote: post #95
chrischattin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. It's in this case, using the term serverless is akin to calling cloud based software (Google Docs, TurboTax, etc) softwareless. It's closer to calling a stop sign a "go sign" than descriptors from your example. Calling managed servers "serverless" is distinctively misleading.

How is it any more misleading than “bugs”, “containers”, “the cloud”,”server farms”, etc. Wouldn’t you be the first to criticize someone who didn’t take the time to understand other computer concepts that had been around for years and then attempted to speak intelligently about them?

It's misleading because "serverless" intuitively means peer to peer, where everything runs on clients and there are truly no servers. So unlike "bug" it has an intuitive meaning that is the opposite of what the buzzword now means.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#168

Post by woutr_be »

Cyph0n wrote: post #138

I’ve been working on a small side project that involves processing incoming email. In particular, it’s an app that needs to do something for each email it receives from (hopefully paying!) users. I am not interested in storing user mail, so SES is just too costly, at least according to a quick worst-case calculation. That leaves me with two options: 1. Self-hosted Postfix 2. Mail service like Mailgun With (1), there…

I’m actually doing something similar, I opted for SES, S3 and Lamda, I am a bit worried about costs, especially when i need to scale up, and handle larger emails.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#169

Post by baddox »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #79
krapp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...so, there is a server? What's with the name, then? The name is just a marketing gimmick. Absent any other context, "serverless" seems like it must be a paradigm shifting technology so sufficiently advanced that it renders servers obsolete, as if by magic. It's the same sort of trick that people sometimes pull when they show off an application to "do x in 10 lines" (or some absurd low number), when the app is just…

It's an annoying marketing term, sure enough, but the ideas it names aren't terrible. It's not always a mistake to pay someone else to take care of maintenance, scaling and security. Perhaps managed service would be better?

It’s more than just a managed service. RDS is Amazon’s managed database cloud service, but you still provision and pay for a specific virtual server with a certain number of CPUs and amount of RAM. “Serverless” generally implies that you do not provision any server hardware (even virtual) and instead only provide application code.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#170

Post by bdcravens »

rahuldottech wrote: post #27
abjKT26nO8 wrote: post #5

I don't know anything about serverless --- to this day I fail to understand what this word is even supposed to mean. And the deployment diagram[1] sure looks complicated to me. I think I prefer old-school servers. [1]: " rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0x4447/0x4447-product-s3-e...

Yeah, it's a really dumb term. > Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server ...so, there is a server? What's with the name, then?

You may be shocked to find out that the infrastructure behind a wireless phone does indeed use wires.
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