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Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?

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Re: Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?

#11

Post by Cyriou »

andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Why lambda? Just run nodejs. The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones. You don’t need any of the cloud stuff , except a Linux virtual machine. Stop drinking the cloud kool ade, it’s making things much more complex and expensive for questionable gain. Learn how to, you know, run software on a Linux computer.

Say I am building a marketplace which I plan: will get many users. Also, we are only 2 building it.

I am pretty sure this is way more expansive to spend engineering time making it possible for server(s) to scale using kubernetes and stuff, than just using serverless.

And later with many users, we estimate what better be implemented manually to save money, because at this point it would actually save us money to employ a new engineer than continue paying serverless due to number of users.

Don't you think serverless makes sense?

Re: Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?

#12

Post by andrewstuart »

Cyriou wrote: post #11
andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Why lambda? Just run nodejs. The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones. You don’t need any of the cloud stuff , except a Linux virtual machine. Stop drinking the cloud kool ade, it’s making things much more complex and expensive for questionable gain. Learn how to, you know, run software on a Linux computer.

Say I am building a marketplace which I plan: will get many users. Also, we are only 2 building it. I am pretty sure this is way more expansive to spend engineering time making it possible for server(s) to scale using kubernetes and stuff, than just using serverless. And later with many users, we estimate what better be implemented manually to save money, because at this point it would actually save us money to emplo…

Why would you run kubernetes?

Do you really feel that serverless is somehow faster than a reasonably modern computer?

Nodejs on a single machine can manage tens of thousands of connections if not hundreds of thousands.

The vast, vast majority of sites would never be able to consume 50% of the computing power in a modern gaming OC.

Re: Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?

#14

Post by brap »

Cyriou wrote: post #11
andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Why lambda? Just run nodejs. The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones. You don’t need any of the cloud stuff , except a Linux virtual machine. Stop drinking the cloud kool ade, it’s making things much more complex and expensive for questionable gain. Learn how to, you know, run software on a Linux computer.

Say I am building a marketplace which I plan: will get many users. Also, we are only 2 building it. I am pretty sure this is way more expansive to spend engineering time making it possible for server(s) to scale using kubernetes and stuff, than just using serverless. And later with many users, we estimate what better be implemented manually to save money, because at this point it would actually save us money to emplo…

It's not all or nothing, there are in-between approaches.

For example you can write your portable app in Node.js (with or without containerization) and push it to a "serverless" PaaS, without running your own linux machine or worrying about k8s.

e.g Fly.io, Render, Railway...

Re: Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?

#16

Post by dpats »

Cyriou wrote: post #11
andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Why lambda? Just run nodejs. The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones. You don’t need any of the cloud stuff , except a Linux virtual machine. Stop drinking the cloud kool ade, it’s making things much more complex and expensive for questionable gain. Learn how to, you know, run software on a Linux computer.

Say I am building a marketplace which I plan: will get many users. Also, we are only 2 building it. I am pretty sure this is way more expansive to spend engineering time making it possible for server(s) to scale using kubernetes and stuff, than just using serverless. And later with many users, we estimate what better be implemented manually to save money, because at this point it would actually save us money to emplo…

You can scale without learning kubernetes. Heroku is mature and easy to use.

Re: Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?

#17

Post by nickdothutton »

The distant hum of hornets grows louder as you approach the HN thread. There is no substitute for architecting your service for the market and with knowledge of the computing machinery (which boils down to physics) that will underpin it. By which I mean understanding how it will be used, how it will grow, which parts of it will require “structural strength” and which are “decorative” and how what you are developing will manage to align both with the customers requirements and what the physics of available computing machinery can provide.

Re: Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?

#19

Post by gadflyinyoureye »

andrewstuart wrote: post #6

Why lambda? Just run nodejs. The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones. You don’t need any of the cloud stuff , except a Linux virtual machine. Stop drinking the cloud kool ade, it’s making things much more complex and expensive for questionable gain. Learn how to, you know, run software on a Linux computer.

Here's my use case for a lambda monolith. We have a distributed process. It's very low activity; probably only a few hundred calls a day. However, it's a few hundred million in value over the year. We have 30 some odd services using NestJS to make Lambdas easier manage and to also run locally along with localstack.

If each of these services was 1 server, and each server cost around $20, we'd have to spend $600/month. I know for a fact that there are times where each service request can consume 80% of the memory. For safety we'd want at least twice the memory or number of units, which are functionally doubling the cost. That $600 can easily balloon to 12 or 2400 per month if I were to host the services. Now add another $600 per month for the test environment. So we'd be looking at $1200 - $3000 a month if we kept things really lean.

Now here's the lambda side. Most are about $3 per month (KMS is the lion's share of the cost) for the test & prod. So $90 in service hosting. Yearly lambda is $1080. Yearly self hosting/EC2/droplets is $14,000-36,000. Now repeat this pattern across 5 teams with similar approaches.

The savings add up for us. Now is this a universally true statement? Nope. But there are valid reasons.

Fun fact, if we ever needed to move off of lambdas, we can because NestJS sits on Express. As long as we can access the datastores there is minimal work to move.

Re: Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?

#20

Post by diesal11 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #10
HyprMusic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of cases where lambda is a better fit than hosting a server. Just like there are plenty of cases where it's not an appropriate fit. By flat out refusing to consider it, you become as much of a "drone" as the people you call out.

>> There are plenty of cases where lambda is a better fit than hosting a server. Such as? If it’s regional latency then run a machine in the region.

Out of the box lambda costs $0 when not in use, built in autoscaling, automatic runtime security updates, stdout straight into Cloudwatch, docker support...the list goes on.
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