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Launch HN: Defer (YC W23) – Zero-infrastructure background jobs for Node.js

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Re: Launch HN: Defer (YC W23) – Zero-infrastructure background jobs for Node.js

#101

Post by bayesian_horse »

abdellah123 wrote: post #93

I don't see myself using a non open source solution for such a critical part of my app Why not open source it and use an open core model?

I'd guess their main work and IP at the moment revolves around the devops and autoscaling parts. Defer's main value proposition seems to be in the reduced workload on developers and their infrastructure team (if they have any).

If you are able to run and maintain a continuously integrated microservice on a kubernetes cluster (or something similar, maybe severless), then you really don't need Defer, as far as I understand it. There's already a lot of CI/CD and autoscaling open sourced.

I haven't tried it yet, but I guess most of the "runtime" is already open sourced, otherwise the background jobs can't run locally...

Re: Launch HN: Defer (YC W23) – Zero-infrastructure background jobs for Node.js

#102

Post by bayesian_horse »

programmarchy wrote: post #91
atleta wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's one more service that you have very little control over and one more service that you have to manage over a web interface or (maybe) their own command line tool. It's on a separate network so they may go down and cause outage in your own app, go out of business, etc. (Yes, your IaaS service provider can go down as well, but that's a much larger operation and something that's very-very likely to have a mu…

"It may go down" vs. "Save X hours of dev" Depends what you're building, but likely a good trade if it's an MVP. At $30/mo you're already ahead if it saves you 1 hour of dev time. Most of the time, I don't want control over my infrastructure (boring, low value); I'd rather focus on building features (fun, high value).

And at least when I host stuff it still goes down at least from time to time and I have to put in additional time to fix it.

You need to put up significant resources in order to beat a dedicated team running this. Many companies can do that. Many can't. Even Twitter increasingly runs into problems with site reliability...

Re: Launch HN: Defer (YC W23) – Zero-infrastructure background jobs for Node.js

#103

Post by lytefm »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #98
bluelightning2k wrote: post #4

If we all have at least one cloud, why would we seperate out this one piece and run it in Defer instead? I don't mean to be unkind it's a legitimate question not sarcasm. It just seems like a subset of Cloud Functions or a subset of Lambda - without being connected to the rest or any of our existing workflow, monitoring, secrets, etc.

You already set up that workflow. That can be a major PITA. Also I don't think this is as much about the "compute" of the background job as much as the nodejs app saying "take care of this for me please, got this? Don't bother me again until I ask for the result". Endpoint handlers are flaky. They aren't guaranteed to run to completion even through no fault of their own. They should ideally have short and predictable…

> If you set up all the CI/CD pipelines to make that work.

I've been "abusing" GitLab CI pipelines a lot for running periodic background jobs that I'd like to have separated from the "regular" backend and without worrying much about deployment.

It supports Cron Syntax for scheduling, manual re-runs, provides secret management and download of artifacts, alerts me on failure and allows me to easily use the docker images in our registry.

Sure, I'm not storing anything in a database or calling the pipeline via an endpoint. But if that's needed, it should probably be "part of the regular backend".

Re: Launch HN: Defer (YC W23) – Zero-infrastructure background jobs for Node.js

#105

Post by Aeolun »

johtso wrote: post #61
gearnode wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very clearly infrastructure. Putting "zero infrastructure" in the title and using the same API as Lambda invoke etc. doesn't make it true. > I also get double the risk of downtime, security as it's a third party running on top of AWS vs. just running on AWS. You are right. We provide an infrastructure service. We mean by "zero infrastructure" that you don't have to implement and/or manage your own. Our service…

I do wish people had less of a tendency to be shy about Typescript in their product documentation. It's a selling point, show it off! Examples end up being a little more verbose, but they actually end up being useful for people that are writing Typescript (probably a closely overlapping group with those that care about their background jobs not disappearing).

I use included Typescript types on npm as a sort of unofficial filter for what libraries I want to use now.

Re: Launch HN: Defer (YC W23) – Zero-infrastructure background jobs for Node.js

#106

Post by Aeolun »

fswd wrote: post #31

Why a company with VC backing for something so simple? I am confused why somebody would think this is so important, they would need funding. Anybody with 1-2 years development experience should be able to hack something up in redis or even just crontab and flag files. I use postgraphile graphile-worker https://github.com/graphile/worker for this. For example, every month we roll over credits. For each user, when they…

To be fair, background jobs in Node.js kind of suck right now. The existing solution aren’t really robust enough to use withou constant babysitting (at least the ones I’ve tried, for the volume I’m sending through them).

Re: Launch HN: Defer (YC W23) – Zero-infrastructure background jobs for Node.js

#107

Post by Aeolun »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #102
programmarchy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It may go down" vs. "Save X hours of dev" Depends what you're building, but likely a good trade if it's an MVP. At $30/mo you're already ahead if it saves you 1 hour of dev time. Most of the time, I don't want control over my infrastructure (boring, low value); I'd rather focus on building features (fun, high value).

And at least when I host stuff it still goes down at least from time to time and I have to put in additional time to fix it. You need to put up significant resources in order to beat a dedicated team running this. Many companies can do that. Many can't. Even Twitter increasingly runs into problems with site reliability...

At least when I host this I’m in a position to fix it, instead of twiddle my thumbs and hope they’ll get around to fixing my environment soon.

It’s just scary to hand off such an important part of your system to a third party.

Re: Launch HN: Defer (YC W23) – Zero-infrastructure background jobs for Node.js

#110

Post by rozap »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #96

Interesting you can make money from this sort of thing.

Every time a crazy workaround for node.js's shortcomings arises I think about how hardware engineers must feel. Your magnum opus is giving people 2, 4, even 16 core supercomputers and then the software engineers come along and start using this hot new single threaded tech called node. Sure, run multiple processes and then you get to spend most of the cycles passing stuff around. I think if I was a hardware engineer I'd want to quit and become a potato farmer.
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