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DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

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Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#81
post #20
post #3

I’ve been looking forward to this since the nimbella acq, but now I feel betrayed by the new pricing and probably won’t even try it.

Sorry to hear that, I welcome a chance to understand this feedback further.

I'd guess this is a difference in usage based vs per-user pricing, but that's wild speculation

Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#82
post #80

The maximum execution duration of 5 seconds seems incredibly short! The only time I've used "cloud functions" in the past has been for executing complex jobs that may take up to several minutes. For this, cloud functions has been very useful and easy to scale. I hope DO can consider increasing this limit.

Is this not quite expensive?

Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at their ever increasing pricing, no, I wouldn't say so. Linode is so far staying true to their promise of individual developer focused cloud.

Welllllllll... don't forget that Linode had grown very stagnant, and had no desire to cut prices, until DigitalOcean came along and forced the issue. Once DO showed up, Linode suddenly had to produce nice tooling and $5/mo VM's. I don't think that would have happened otherwise, and I'd be really surprised if Linode doesn't follow DO's price increases within a few months. Not really saying this as a DigitalOcean evang…

Absolutely agree! Never put a company on a pedestal! But IIRC Linode has had a long history of decreasing prices by adding better specs to existing plans, not sure how that will change with their acquisition. Just keep in mind to build portable apps and avoid lock in.

Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#84
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The foundation is Apache OpenWhisk https://github.com/apache/openwhisk with DO specific customization to work with App Platform, managed databases, trusted sources, log shipping, and other DO specific capabilities. The closest programming model is AWS Lambda in terms of the semantics and execution model.

So that means that there is a vendor lock in and I can't just move over to say IBM Cloud Functions (despite both being based on OpenWhisk)?

OpenWhisk functions are vendor agnostic and have a generic signature of JSON in and JSON out and no other dependencies. Functions on DigitalOcean may also run functions from Netlify and AWS Lambda (and vice versa). You can run the same functions on IBM Cloud Functions and Adobe I/O runtime. This article from 2020 runs the same code on multiple clouds included self hosted for the curious https://openwhisk.blog/post/advocate/openwhisk-portable-serv....

Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#85
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep - it's coming.

Thanks! While I've got you here... do you have any insight into the Spaces roadmap? I've been waiting for per-Space permissions for access keys to land to enable me to migrate a bunch of S3 buckets. Thanks again.

Finer grained IAM like permissions but without the AWS complexity is of great interest. I will see what else I can share.

Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#86
post #21

What are the main differences to aws lambda? Will you be transparent about how it works, such as when a function is frozen? This is something I miss with many Aws services

I shared a few details above - with the implementation backed by a mature open source project, there are lots of details available already. Thanks for bringing this up though so we can focus on the parts of interest to the community as we roll out more technical documents on the product.

Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#87

A handful of firms now doing this, same sort of serverless/workers thing, makes me hesitant to be bullish on certain players like CF, Netlify, Vercel, whatever other sort of 'up n comers'. If they're all offering it, the value of one over another goes down drasically. Yeah yeah, vendor lock in, it's fine, people have options and will stay where they want, but some of the big value propositions from these firms over t…

Serverless computing is the future of cloud computing with more and more infrastructure management shifted to the provider rather than internal infra and ops teams. It isn't to say it's all or nothing, and it is a long enduring transition which is why the DigitalOcean integration between Functions and App Platform is differentiated related to some of the other vendors you mention. You don't have to choose between serverfull (containers, servers, kubernetes even) and serverless -- functions, and entirely managed services like CDNs, load balancers, containers that scale from 0 to N, SSL cert management, automatic build and deploys, rollbacks, API gateways, object storage ... and managed serverless key-value stores and databases.

So functions is really table stakes for a cloud, as are events, scheduled and background functions. You've seen this play out with every cloud provider since the arrival of AWS Lambda. Our goal is to make it scale, make it cheap, and make it secure with DigitalOcean developer simplicity and so you are right, a corner stone of this endeavor is the developer experience and integration with cloud services because a cloud application consumes all of these services. As these become core competencies for a cloud, the integrations between all the services only get better and deliver more value to the customer.

Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#88
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! While I've got you here... do you have any insight into the Spaces roadmap? I've been waiting for per-Space permissions for access keys to land to enable me to migrate a bunch of S3 buckets. Thanks again.

Finer grained IAM like permissions but without the AWS complexity is of great interest. I will see what else I can share.

Thank you – I'm desperate to even just isolate access to a single space, to replicate what I currently have on S3, so I can multi-tenant my clients' media storage on the Spaces platform.

Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm, you just sounded like an add for DO here: "DO won't randomly shut down your account because they guess you might be doing something fishy like spamming" ...and don't tell me you don't get "spam" from AWS users. Only GCP is doing more policing, but as a dev I'd be wary of using them of fear of being labeled "suspicious" because some weirder scraping usage patterns or whatever.

The subject here is Digital Ocean. Yes, I get spam from seemingly all providers. However, AWS takes action and DO does not. DO will simply pass my complaint on to the spammer and my problem becomes worse. I've setup a rule to simply drop mail from DO IP addresses, no legit mail ever comes from DO. Sending a spam complaint to DO will do nothing more than verify to spammers that you are a good target. If DO wants a bet…

Shrug. So anyway, since most of us use 3rd party services to send emails, using DO is perfectly fine. Whatever.

(And if the extra profit they get from hosting spammers results in slightly lower prices for me then I'm glad to profit. It's about sending spam, not firing missiles or dropping bombs. Again, whatever.)

Re: DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm, you just sounded like an add for DO here: "DO won't randomly shut down your account because they guess you might be doing something fishy like spamming" ...and don't tell me you don't get "spam" from AWS users. Only GCP is doing more policing, but as a dev I'd be wary of using them of fear of being labeled "suspicious" because some weirder scraping usage patterns or whatever.

The subject here is Digital Ocean. Yes, I get spam from seemingly all providers. However, AWS takes action and DO does not. DO will simply pass my complaint on to the spammer and my problem becomes worse. I've setup a rule to simply drop mail from DO IP addresses, no legit mail ever comes from DO. Sending a spam complaint to DO will do nothing more than verify to spammers that you are a good target. If DO wants a bet…

Also

> DO will simply pass my complaint on to the spammer

Again, as a DO customer I want to be able to see any complains fired against me. Point in plus for them from the perspective of a potential customer.

...you seem to misunderstand what the desired attributes of a cloud provider are. Besides at most having marginally more spam in the world, how you seem to say the ideal cloud provider should behave is really worse for everyone. You're playing a "oh but think of the children" argument but with "spam" recipients instead of the children so it's hard to have any sympathy for such malicious reasoning.

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