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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

#221

Post by Rapzid »

scarface74 wrote: post #193
tuldia wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my name doesn’t give you a clue,I was around and developing way before AWS or hosted solutions was a thing. Being able to provision resources by writing yaml and not having to deal with the infrastructure gatekeepers is a godsend. Take some time to learn some soft skills, just enough to be able to convince people to do stuff for you, if you are the "throw over the wall ones" I recommend to get out of your sillo…

My team and management (who is even older than I am so he’s not a young idealist by any means) are aggressively “killing as many pets” as possible and going all in on managed services and serviceless - including lambda, Fargate (Serverless Docker), CodeBuild (Serverless builds), AWS SFTP (getting rid of our sftp server). Don’t get me started on the “cloud consultants” who were just a bunch of old school net ops folks…

To bolster you argument a bit..

I have a background in systems engineering building public/private cloud from hardware(cab and networking physical and logical provisioning) to VM provisioning automation and tooling. I've provided managed server, PHP hosting, Mail, and just about any other form of support you can imagine an ISP/Hosting provider needing to provide.

These days I deal more with full stack development and SRE type work. I ACTIVELY AVOID running servers, using tools like Chef and Ansible, and running kubernetes clusters unless there is a strong value proposition for them that can't be ignored. This despite the fact that I have no gatekeepers and ton of experience with all of them.

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

#222

Post by tyingq »

scarface74 wrote: post #185
tyingq wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can do that the same way Amazon does it. Like I said, Amazon packaged existing tech in an easy to use way.

That still begs the question, why am I as a developer wasting time fiddling with infrastructure that I could just throw a little money and a yaml file at AWS and let them do it? How am I adding a business value that will make my company money doing grunt work?

I was explaining why I consider it to be "managed cgi-bin".

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

#223

Post by choward »

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...

My biggest problem with the "serverless" term is that it's a solution to a few different problems conflated into one term.

* Not having to manage a server.

* Not having to have dedicated resources which can be wasteful.

* Having an architecture that scales.

When most people talk about serverless, they mean something that solves all three of those problems. When I think of serverless, I think it only needs to solve the first problem.

What if I don't want to manage a server, but I want dedicated resources? I just want to deploy a standard web app (written with node js for example) with a postgres backend and preallocated resources but without having to maintain a server? Is that serverless?

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

#224

Post by MaxBarraclough »

baddox wrote: post #217
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but we could view that as a quirk of the way they handle billing. If the instance fails, you're insulated from that, right?

I’m no expert, but I think you run RDS on an EC2 instance, so it’s basically just a normal virtual server running Amazon’s managed version of the RDBMS. I’m not sure what happens if an instance “fails” but I assume you can have downtime if Amazon needs to move your VM, just like EC2, but I assume Amazon handles moving the instance and restarting it.

> I think you run RDS on an EC2 instance, so it’s basically just a normal virtual server running Amazon’s managed version of the RDBMS

Yes I think that's right. That is to say, it doesn't give you replication.

> I’m not sure what happens if an instance “fails” but I assume you can have downtime if Amazon needs to move your VM, just like EC2, but I assume Amazon handles moving the instance and restarting it.

No need for the quotation marks, that's the correct terminology. Your suspicions seem to be right on - it looks like RDS handles instance-failure for you, with non-trivial downtime, but no data-loss. [0]

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-rds-under-the-h...

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

#225

Post by Rapzid »

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.

A lot of concepts that apply to serverless and other cloud computing services are applicable across providers as well. Even if the details are different.

I would liken it to learning programming languages. Learning new languages isn't considered "locking you into a language". It's even widely considered beneficial because it makes learning more languages even easier and brings new perspectives to the table.

Edit: An interesting example. Learning something enough to know when NOT to use it is gaining a valuable skill that's worth $$ to employers.

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

#226

Post by scarface74 »

rumanator wrote: post #219
scarface74 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I’m going by the only facts that you offered. You did not. You fabricated accusations to fill gaps in your comprehension based on your imagination alone, and proceeded to use your made-up accusations to attack others. That's not cool, and just speaks volumes regarding your lack of arguments and your ability to contribute to a discussion.

Your comment

I have first-hand accounts of how FaaS offerings have lead developers to waste a couple of weeks getting FaaS to do what could have been done in a couple of hours with a tried-and-true web service.

There is no world where a competent developer who knows his tooling should take “a couple of weeks” to set up an API on lambda that would only take “a couple of hours on a web server”.

You can treat a lambda instance just like a web server by using API Gateway, proxy integration and simple to use function provided by AWS that translates the lambda/APIGW event to a form that your framework expects.

Hosting static content on S3 (css, JS, html) is a click of a few buttons. Copying your content is a simple “aws s3 cp” command to do an “xcopy deployment”.

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

#227

Post by ab_testing »

coder1001 wrote: post #14
arno1 wrote: post #12

> This stack was created out of frustration due to the fact that to this day there's no easy way to have a full email server without the overhead of installing and configuring all servers needed to handle incoming and outgoing messages. Interesting approach, though I solved this frustration by the use of a Docker and kept "my data is mine" + "no vendor lock-in" + "I control all the gears" approach. (Though, it's not…

Do you mind writing a blog post somewhere explaining to noobs how this can be done? This will be a great post with lots of traffic I imagine! Thanks, great work!

If you are a noob with a domain and need to host your own mail server, you need mail-in-a-box. Look it up. It runs on a VPS and configures email and even a static site for your domain. It also comes with a dashboard where you can create additional email accounts.

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

#228

Post by kazen44 »

rumanator wrote: post #118
cs02rm0 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is in the cloud. It's different in that you don't have access to the cloud server, just a service on it. To me it's like having one hand tied behind your back while someone else uses their hand to do what you'd have done with the one tied behind your back. It's cheaper, sometimes it works the way you want it to, but you always feel a bit restricted.

> It's cheaper, sometimes it works the way you want it to, but you always feel a bit restricted. The "cheapness" argument is open to debate. So far the main argument I've seen for Function-as-a-Service offerings is that it's cheaper than just paying for a VM instance to run a dedicated service. To start off, a dedicated VM can cost about 5€ a month, which represents the absolute total saving that is supposed to be dr…

a VM can cost far less then $5 a month to run, depending if your bussiness is large enough and can run (or have it run for you) its infra properly.

I once did some simple estimation of a cost of a VM inside our own infrastructure, and the costs was something around a euro or less.

A single, modern server can hosts a crapton of VM's, especially if you have a competent operations team inside your bussiness who builds tooling for it.

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

#229

Post by kortilla »

danenania wrote: post #25
arno1 wrote: post #12

> This stack was created out of frustration due to the fact that to this day there's no easy way to have a full email server without the overhead of installing and configuring all servers needed to handle incoming and outgoing messages. Interesting approach, though I solved this frustration by the use of a Docker and kept "my data is mine" + "no vendor lock-in" + "I control all the gears" approach. (Though, it's not…

Another drawback is that while yes, you can scale up fairly easily with terraform, your server can also fall over if you get a heavy burst of traffic, and you'll return errors until you're able to provision more machines. Depending on what you're doing, how fast you're growing, and how much tolerance your users have for downtime, that might be a pretty big deal.

It’s a mail server. Traffic bursts aren’t really a thing unless you’re servicing thousands of users.

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

#230

Post by theSuda »

arno1 wrote: post #15
coder1001 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind writing a blog post somewhere explaining to noobs how this can be done? This will be a great post with lots of traffic I imagine! Thanks, great work!

I am actually thinking on writing it since long ago... But not motivated enough... :/

Please find some time to write it. It would be a great resource for self hosting.
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