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Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

frantic.im

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Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#31

Post by Dunedan »

claudiusd wrote: post #16
Dunedan wrote: post #7

> A lambda publishes a message to SNS, another one picks it up and writes something to DynamoDB, the third one takes that new record and sends an email… Or, you know, just do related functionality in the same AWS Lambda function. While I would probably do the sending of an e-mail asynchronously as well (as AWS Lambda function triggered by a DynamoDB stream), the indirection over SNS to write something to DynamoDB see…

Completely agree. Most of the criticism I've seen comes from people who don't have a good grasp of the platform or tools, or haven't adapted their style to the "serverless mindset". There's definitely a new technique I've had to teach myself in order to build serverless systems effectively. Today I'm getting great results from the approach.

Yes, absolutely. And to be honest to get started with it for a software developer which doesn't have any "cloud" experience is pretty rough. Suddenly that developer needs to have a understanding of AWS in general, IAM, CloudFormation and all the services which can be utilized to avoid having to write custom code. It's a steep and long learning curve.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#32

Post by thismodernlife »

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec.

Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps either via Heroku, via the new Digital Ocean k8s app cluster or – and this is my new favourite tool – using Hatchbox.io to deploy apps to Digital Ocean or AWS. It’s a dream!

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#34

Post by Dunedan »

alerighi wrote: post #10
Dunedan wrote: post #7

> A lambda publishes a message to SNS, another one picks it up and writes something to DynamoDB, the third one takes that new record and sends an email… Or, you know, just do related functionality in the same AWS Lambda function. While I would probably do the sending of an e-mail asynchronously as well (as AWS Lambda function triggered by a DynamoDB stream), the indirection over SNS to write something to DynamoDB see…

The impossible to replicate the production environment I think was referred to impossible to replicate locally, on your machine. At my job I use AWS serverless services and I get a lot of frustration not being able to test and debug code offline. Having each time to upload some code to debug it is time consuming. Also you have to rely only on logs to debug, you obviously cannot use a debugger, and thus the solution i…

I agree. Iteration speed and the ability to debug applications are the biggest downsides for me as well when developing Serverless applications.

To make debugging at least a bit easier, I prefer doing structured logging (e.g. by utilizing AWS Lambda Powertools [1]) to get the ability to query the logs efficiently with CloudWatch Insights [2]. Also AWS X-Ray [3] is really valuable to understand how a Serverless application behaves.

[1]: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-powertools-python

[2]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/logs/Ana...

[3]: https://aws.amazon.com/xray/

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#35

Post by rangoon626 »

rualca wrote: post #11
jspash wrote: post #6

Every time I read that one of the “downsides” of RoR is that it “doesn’t sound cool” I know I’m in the right place! I’ll have mature teammates who understand the right tool for the right job. I won’t have to work with magpie developers with an acute case of not-invented-here syndrome. Granted Rails isn’t the answer to everything. I’ve been loving what we can accomplish with elixir/Phoenix. But I’ll leave the hipsteri…

> (...) I’ll have mature teammates who understand the right tool for the right job. I Honest question: what leads you to believe that Ruby on Rails, or even Ruby, is the right tool for the right job? You didn't even mentioned the job, so why do you automatically assume Ruby is the right tool? Additionally, by ignoring popularity you're also ignoring availability of documentation and examples and mindshare. You're als…

I too have had experience after experience where every Ruby on Rails project in maintenance mode is a complete disaster.

It seems like it’s great for quickly building things, but it is unmaintainable, unless you wrote the thing. I am very flexible otherwise, but Ruby on Rails is banned from any project I’m involved in.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#36

Post by thinkingemote »

rualca wrote: post #11
jspash wrote: post #6

Every time I read that one of the “downsides” of RoR is that it “doesn’t sound cool” I know I’m in the right place! I’ll have mature teammates who understand the right tool for the right job. I won’t have to work with magpie developers with an acute case of not-invented-here syndrome. Granted Rails isn’t the answer to everything. I’ve been loving what we can accomplish with elixir/Phoenix. But I’ll leave the hipsteri…

> (...) I’ll have mature teammates who understand the right tool for the right job. I Honest question: what leads you to believe that Ruby on Rails, or even Ruby, is the right tool for the right job? You didn't even mentioned the job, so why do you automatically assume Ruby is the right tool? Additionally, by ignoring popularity you're also ignoring availability of documentation and examples and mindshare. You're als…

> a) learning a brand new programming language, b) learning exotic frameworks, c) getting acquainted with ..language.., d) learning how to troubleshoot and debug ... applications, e) properly setup a software dev environment, and f) finally fix the issue.

Applies with every language and framework one is not familiar with.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#37

Post by k__ »

knodi wrote: post #25

Serverless for web apps have one big issues. The cold starts of lambda(s) can be over .5-1 seconds at peek times (us-east-1) any way.

Thete are multiple solutions to that problem.

1. API Gateway and AppSync integrate directly with many other AWS services, no Lambdas needed, and thus no cold-starts.

2. Lambda has provisioned capacity.

3. Other cloud providers like Cloudflare offer FaaS without cold-starts.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#38

Post by luxurytent »

thismodernlife wrote: post #32

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec. Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps…

Replace Rails with Django and this comment seems to hold true for many in the Django community. Boring can be good.

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#39

Post by xwdv »

thismodernlife wrote: post #32

I have no strong opinion on serverless but I’ve used Rails for 13 years now (in massive $multi-million SaaS products as well as hobby projects) and it still makes me happy. I keep thinking about learning Node and React but I just can’t be bothered because Rails lets me get things done so quickly while also being a joy to write Ruby and Rspec. Regarding hosting, I think this is actually a great time to host Rails apps…

All you need is one weekend to really learn a useful amount of Node and React. You can’t spare it?

Re: Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

#40

Post by ed25519FUUU »

alerighi wrote: post #10
Dunedan wrote: post #7

> A lambda publishes a message to SNS, another one picks it up and writes something to DynamoDB, the third one takes that new record and sends an email… Or, you know, just do related functionality in the same AWS Lambda function. While I would probably do the sending of an e-mail asynchronously as well (as AWS Lambda function triggered by a DynamoDB stream), the indirection over SNS to write something to DynamoDB see…

The impossible to replicate the production environment I think was referred to impossible to replicate locally, on your machine. At my job I use AWS serverless services and I get a lot of frustration not being able to test and debug code offline. Having each time to upload some code to debug it is time consuming. Also you have to rely only on logs to debug, you obviously cannot use a debugger, and thus the solution i…

> At my job I use AWS serverless services and I get a lot of frustration not being able to test and debug code offline.

For my purposes debugging is as simple as crafting a payload and feeding it through the handler locally. I match credentials locally with what my lambda runs as. Since it’s a monolith function it behaves basically the same way, including the usage of a debugger.

To make life a little easier any time there’s an exception it persists that ordinal payload so I can just replay it locally.

But I agree that serverless is mostly overrated for most use cases.

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