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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

#201

I'm missing something - how are people reading this in an email client if it doesn't have IMAP support?

My take away is that you'd be able to receive your emails and customize the handling of every email.

i.e. emails are received and put into specific buckets/folders and then, per message, a process is triggered to do something unique (put into database, forward to another IMAP'ed box, etc.)

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SES and S3 side of things would be free? (62,000 free per month) https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/ Yes, complexity would be a factor for sure.

For receiving they only get 1,000 free, and for both after that it's $0.10/1,000 emails, which isn't very much at all.

> SES charges $0.09 per 1000 mail “chunks”, where a chunk is 256 Kb of data. This is on top of the base SES fee and S3 operation and storage fees.

> But it only charges for each complete chunk. So Others elsewhere here have stated otherwise - haven't looked for the small print on AWS' page myself yet, though.

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

#203

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...

It means you string a bunch of shit together via aws lambda instances and docker microservices

If its any consolation, at this years Vegas AWS love-fest, most people started walking out once the Amazon presenter started talking 'serverless' recipes

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

#204
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

complex but not to mention expensive. i wonder what the costs per month would be sending/receiving a relatively small workload per day (1000 messages) doing it with SES and S3 versus a cheap vps provider.

The SES and S3 side of things would be free? (62,000 free per month) https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/ Yes, complexity would be a factor for sure.

It's 62,000 free only if the emails are being sent from an EC2 instance, else it is $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, it may very well be true that one particular serverless product is very expensive or overly complex. That’s a fine argument to make. But that has nothing to do with whether the term “serverless” has a well-established meaning. It’s not just a buzzword, or at least it’s not always used as a buzzword and does in fact have a straightforward meaning. If I don’t like serverless products, or I think people need to be…

> But that has nothing to do with whether the term “serverless” has a well-established meaning. It’s not just a buzzword, or at least it’s not always used as a buzzword and does in fact have a straightforward meaning. You're confounding two independent issues: "serverless" being a buzzword, and "serverless" not having a precise and well established meaning. The fact that "serverless" is indeed a buzzword is indisputa…

> The fact that "serverless" is indeed a buzzword is indisputable.

It can be used as a buzzword, but it isn’t always. The same goes for “the cloud.” It’s used in marketing because it sounds cool and people think they need it, but at the same time it can be perfectly clear to use the term in technical contexts.

> For example, "serverless" is used by some people to refer to a more concrete and specific and well established concept of Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). Yet, albeit FaaS is portraied as a subset of "serverless" concept, FaaS does not represent the concept, which is assumed to be more broadly defined.

What’s vague about this? FaaS is a serverless product, but not all serverless products are FaaS.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Aurora Serverless is a distinct offering. Regular Aurora you have a certain server of a certain size. Aurora Serverless autoscales - just like lambda.

> Yes Aurora Serverless is a distinct offering. Again, you're quite (and patently) wrong. Aurora Serverless is quite bluntly a configuration of AWS Aurora to add autoscaling to AWS Aurora instances. https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide... > Aurora Serverless autoscales - just like lambda. If you're confused to the point of confounding autoscaling w…

Well, no I’m not “patently wrong”. Aurora Serverless has limitations and features that are not available with Aurora. This includes lacking the ability to load and unload from S3 and it has the “Data API” which lets you use APIs to interact with the database instead of your typical database connections. This feature is not available with regular Aurora. It was implemented specifically for Serverless workloads so your lambda doesn’t have to “run inside your VPC” since that increases the cold start times.

We specifically could not use Aurora Serverless for our ETL jobs because of the lack of integration with S3

Again there is a difference between reading documentation and actually using it.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...

I’m also not confounding “Autoscaling” and services. Being able to scale on demand and “scale down to zero” is one of the parts of how Serverless is defined.

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

#208
post #55
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The emails sent by your $5 VPS wouldn't stand a chance of actually being delivered to people's Gmail or Outlook mailboxes. Whereas SES actually works. Also, it is incredibly easy to ask AWS support to increase the limit. A startup I worked with had only thousands of users; we told AWS about it and they gave us 5 million emails per 24 hours.

This is FUD spread by hosted mail services.

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

#209
post #36

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?

Probably this means that there is no server you can SSH to nor need to maintain. It could probably be called a serverhostage/server-lock-in computing, where someone else keeps the _shared_ server(s) away from you and runs other people's, potentially harmful, instructions as well :-)

I remember serverless PHP. Shared, managed hosting, just add your code, Apache takes care of executing it once per request :-)

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cgi-bin didn’t have any type of process isolation. Also, it didn’t tie in to other none web based events.

cgi-bin had pretty strong process isolation for the day (Unix user account and process boundaries/limits/quotas). Enough to have remarkably robust multitenant setups on single servers.

Unless you were on the other side running Windows IIS as a multi tenant server....
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