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The next generation of serverless

fermyon.com

11–20 of 93 posts

Re: The next generation of serverless

#11
We use AWS Lambda as a monolithic "serverless" to run our Django stack since Lambda can now take standard containers[0].

The full environment, costs us US$100/mnth to run production b2b application. Traffic is quite light, but we literally don't pay for non-usage. The most expensive thing of our monthly bill is the postgres RDS+Elasticache. So for our use case it is extremely cost effective, esp for UAT, Staging where there's no traffic and using the smallest machines possible To me this is the "next generation" of serverless. Back to monolith but where we don't manage even CPU time. We get all the benefits of monolithic repo, debugging, deployment and key benefits of serverless namely pricing+CPU management. It's not edge lambda but admittedly that's not a need of ours.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69512271/will-the-cold-s...

Re: The next generation of serverless

#12

> Serverless apps are applications that are not written as software servers. “Server-less” code is code that responds to events (such as HTTP requests), but does not run as a daemon process listening on a socket. The networking part of serverless architectures is relegated to the infrastructure. The networking part was always and always will be relagated to the infrastructure. Really not sold to the all "serverless"…

Most apt use cases imo are not part of the "main loop" of a webapp but instead to supporting functions, like sending an email, resizing an image, any sort of cron, etc. Or, the micro part of microservices.

Re: The next generation of serverless

#13
This pivots from serverless applications hosting to... a database?

I mean just sell me on the wasm in the cloud premise, that's sounds awesome enough.

The k/v store angle is just confusing. If devs don't want to manage their Dev environment, you can spin one on any cloud. Especially serverless services, which are billed per api usage, are not going to break bank if each developer has it's own Dev backend ok the cloud.

Re: The next generation of serverless

#16

We use AWS Lambda as a monolithic "serverless" to run our Django stack since Lambda can now take standard containers[0]. The full environment, costs us US$100/mnth to run production b2b application. Traffic is quite light, but we literally don't pay for non-usage. The most expensive thing of our monthly bill is the postgres RDS+Elasticache. So for our use case it is extremely cost effective, esp for UAT, Staging wher…

But cold start time. This article claims their cold start time is only one or two milliseconds. Lambda's cold start time is orders of magnitude slower.

Re: The next generation of serverless

#18

We use AWS Lambda as a monolithic "serverless" to run our Django stack since Lambda can now take standard containers[0]. The full environment, costs us US$100/mnth to run production b2b application. Traffic is quite light, but we literally don't pay for non-usage. The most expensive thing of our monthly bill is the postgres RDS+Elasticache. So for our use case it is extremely cost effective, esp for UAT, Staging wher…

What does your cold start time look like with containers?

I was contemplating deploying a similar stack for very occasional internal use: django + postgres rds (no need for cache).

Had some horror stories with Java where the startup time was brutal, so they ended "pre-warming" lambdas. In the end, the whole ordeal cost more than an EC2 running 24/7.

This was several years ago, so I'm curious whether things have improved.

Re: The next generation of serverless

#19

I'm not convinced on their solution. They say you should run Web assembly in containers? How is that next-gen serverless?

Mikkel from Fermyon here.

That's a misunderstanding. Spin runs your webassembly directly from disk. Spin does support distributing application using OCI registries, but they do not run in a container runtime, just a webassembly runtime (Wasmtime).

Re: The next generation of serverless

#20

I'm not convinced on their solution. They say you should run Web assembly in containers? How is that next-gen serverless?

Mikkel from Fermyon here. That's a misunderstanding. Spin runs your webassembly directly from disk. Spin does support distributing application using OCI registries, but they do not run in a container runtime, just a webassembly runtime (Wasmtime).

Ah, I see, thanks!
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