Aside: Lambda, out of Peru, is apparently the next virus variant we need to worry about. Edit: I had never seen the word before then I saw it used twice in two days, in different contexts. Just thought it was odd.
Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
#42Really cool post! From the architecture, it's not really clear to me why Lambdas have the 15 min limitation. It seems to me AWS could use the same infrastructure to make a product that competes with Google Cloud Run. Maybe it's a businesses thing?
This service exists, it's called AWS Fargate [0]. [0]: https://read.iopipe.com/how-far-out-is-aws-fargate-a2409d2f9...
This isn't true.
Fargate scales in minutes, not seconds. And it never scales to zero.
Re: Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
#43If you're interested in Firecracker, I wrote a summary of the original paper here: https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/06/17/firecracker-lightweig...
Any idea how much it has diverged from crosvm?
Re: Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
#44One other thing I learned here is that lambda@edge is not actually run on the edge at all. It is forwarded to the nearest datacenter to execute. Not enough capacity in edges to spin up entire VMs for everything, even with Firecracker.
Re: Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
We surely picked up some baggage. Much of it vendor specific. But also we jettison some? You stick a lambda into API gateway and you're on the internet. No servers. No linux setup. No apache conf. I'd encourage you to dive in for 20 hours in pure curiosity mode and see what you find.
Lambda is a proprietary solution that only works for people on AWS. Linux is open, and I just need to put it on a box. How do I install the AWS Lambda stack on a standard Linux box?
You can't.
Are you actually asking this question?
Or you pretending to ask a question because you think the fact that AWS Lambda run on AWS is some huge gotcha that I never imagined and no one would ever tolerate?
I explicitly note vendor-specific baggage. AWS revenue is over 45 billion annually and half of customers use lambda.
Re: Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lambda is a proprietary solution that only works for people on AWS. Linux is open, and I just need to put it on a box. How do I install the AWS Lambda stack on a standard Linux box?
You can't. Are you actually asking this question? Or you pretending to ask a question because you think the fact that AWS Lambda run on AWS is some huge gotcha that I never imagined and no one would ever tolerate? I explicitly note vendor-specific baggage. AWS revenue is over 45 billion annually and half of customers use lambda.
My point is that the industry really hasn't moved on from the old LAMP stack if it's been replaced by a single company. When it truly comes down to it, the day-to-day tools are not ours if they aren't open.
And if deploying a lambda function on my own hardware is vastly more complex, then the tools haven't really changed, they just got outsourced.
There are a bunch of semi-standards like Serverless Framework and Knative, but nothing concrete.
Re: Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering your long experience, didn't you feel like we lost a lot post-PHP? I also stepped out of the PHP world into JS, and never understood why there isn't any apache2-modnodejs... And to me, the serverless JS movement seems to be just that, but with a lot of unnecessary baggage.
We surely picked up some baggage. Much of it vendor specific. But also we jettison some? You stick a lambda into API gateway and you're on the internet. No servers. No linux setup. No apache conf. I'd encourage you to dive in for 20 hours in pure curiosity mode and see what you find.
It's great for a lot of use cases ... But unfortunately there is several important points that prevents to use this combo as a silver bullet.
API gateway is limited to 29 sec of execution, if you need anything longer you will need an EC2 instance (or ECS or fargate) to act as a webserver and call the lambda (up to 15 min), cloudfront is also not an option for this comon use case because it's limited to 180 sec.
Re: Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't. Are you actually asking this question? Or you pretending to ask a question because you think the fact that AWS Lambda run on AWS is some huge gotcha that I never imagined and no one would ever tolerate? I explicitly note vendor-specific baggage. AWS revenue is over 45 billion annually and half of customers use lambda.
My point is that the industry really hasn't moved on from the old LAMP stack if it's been replaced by a single company. When it truly comes down to it, the day-to-day tools are not ours if they aren't open. And if deploying a lambda function on my own hardware is vastly more complex, then the tools haven't really changed, they just got outsourced. There are a bunch of semi-standards like Serverless Framework and Knat…
I agree the tools got outsourced.
I also agree there are big chunks of LAMP under the covers of running an AWS Lambda. So, in that sense, we haven't "moved on" from the old LAMP stack.
I also agree the tools are "not ours" if they aren't open. They do useful things. It's a tradeoff.
Re: Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
#49If you're interested in Firecracker, I wrote a summary of the original paper here: https://www.micahlerner.com/2021/06/17/firecracker-lightweig...
Any idea how much it has diverged from crosvm?
Quite a lot. Initially, a lot of the changes were removing things from crosvm, but adding features like snapshots, and factoring things out into RustVMM, has made them diverge a lot more.
There's some data in the paper about how similar they were then, too.
Re: Behind the scenes, AWS Lambda
#50Fantastic paper. So I've been playing with the java and python runtimes and it's absolutely stunning how much better python is on execution and start up time.
Also how does an event actually get to the lambda handler? Because they can come from all kind of sources.