Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

rehanvdm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 131 posts

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

#21

Post by Cyriou »

andrewstuart wrote: post #12
Cyriou wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it is faster, I think it is way more convenient Ok, say I don't need kubernetes.

I would still do it in AWS, as it is like golden garden, don't need to deep dive into security measures, to manage authorizations manually, to handle database sharding and optimizations, you get notifications systems, ML, data streams and everything just connects together.

From there using lambda is way faster than to develop your own api with caching and making sure it is 100% optimized so that 10 thousands ppl can connect, while in fact you might change it tmrw.

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

#22

Post by anentropic »

intrasight wrote: post #3

The question strikes me as odd. I can't imagine why one would split an API across separate isolated compute nodes. I've used isolated functions in the context of "message orchestration" scenarios, but I'd never do that for an API.

Can't help thinking that a lot of best practice advice from AWS coincidentally maximises your AWS lock-in and billing spend

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

#23

Post by diesal11 »

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.

My company doesn't make more $$$ because i decided to spend a day setting up an EC2 over Lambda or a similar PaaS solution. If anything i've lost valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. Especially when stuff starts going wrong or i have to schedule time to manually apply OS/Runtime security updates.

> The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones.

The cloud has allowed smart people to focus their time on unsolved problems, not waste hours/days setting up linux for the upteenth time.

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

#24

Post by andrewstuart »

diesal11 wrote: post #23
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.

My company doesn't make more $$$ because i decided to spend a day setting up an EC2 over Lambda or a similar PaaS solution. If anything i've lost valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. Especially when stuff starts going wrong or i have to schedule time to manually apply OS/Runtime security updates. > The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones. The cloud has allowed smart people to focus th…

It’s fiction that configuring the cloud is easier than configuring a computer.

I’ve worked at big companies with smart people who burn days and weeks trying to get IAM, gateways, vpcs, firewalls and lambda to play together. Let alone the ongoing nightmare of ops/dev interaction.

Complete cloud fiction.

The worst problem is the giant pile of cloud spaghetti you end up with and no one has any idea what connects to what and what depends on what. Easier to just accumulate more and more resources which cloud companies love.

Just run a computer, it’s easier.

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

#25

Post by jddj »

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.

Uncomplicated image conversion / thumbnailing / pdf report generation / whatever that you don't want to keep a whole container or separate long running task around for.

That's all. The rest goes in VMs.

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

#26

Post by report-to-trees »

I would argue that instead of starting with a Lambda Monolith and splitting routes out when they need to scale separately, you should be starting with an actual monolith and using Lambdas _only_ when a single route needs to scale separately (in a way that fits lambda). The Lambda Monolith is an unnecessary architecture as far as I'm concerned.

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

#27

Post by alex_lav »

andrewstuart wrote: post #24
diesal11 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company doesn't make more $$$ because i decided to spend a day setting up an EC2 over Lambda or a similar PaaS solution. If anything i've lost valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. Especially when stuff starts going wrong or i have to schedule time to manually apply OS/Runtime security updates. > The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones. The cloud has allowed smart people to focus th…

It’s fiction that configuring the cloud is easier than configuring a computer. I’ve worked at big companies with smart people who burn days and weeks trying to get IAM, gateways, vpcs, firewalls and lambda to play together. Let alone the ongoing nightmare of ops/dev interaction. Complete cloud fiction. The worst problem is the giant pile of cloud spaghetti you end up with and no one has any idea what connects to what…

> It’s fiction that configuring the cloud is easier than configuring a computer.

> Just run a computer, it’s easier.

Statements made confidently while also being totally untrue.

> I’ve worked at big companies with smart people who burn days and weeks trying to get IAM, gateways, vpcs, firewalls and lambda to play together

Working with incompetent people is not an excuse.

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

#29

Post by withinboredom »

diesal11 wrote: post #23
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.

My company doesn't make more $$$ because i decided to spend a day setting up an EC2 over Lambda or a similar PaaS solution. If anything i've lost valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. Especially when stuff starts going wrong or i have to schedule time to manually apply OS/Runtime security updates. > The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones. The cloud has allowed smart people to focus th…

They probably do make more money… actually. At least in net profit.

Cost in time to setup a bare metal, production quality k8s cluster with all the bells and whistles from the cloud: 2 weeks and a skill I will have forever. In fact, the second cluster took 4 hours.

Monthly cost: $240 per month.

Time to spin up a new worker, using cloud compute for elastic load beyond base load: 5 minutes.

Base load capabilities: 120ish cores, 1tb ram, ridiculous terabytes of storage.

Cost to run on managed k8s in the cloud: $5-20k per month.

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

#30

Post by diesal11 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #24
diesal11 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company doesn't make more $$$ because i decided to spend a day setting up an EC2 over Lambda or a similar PaaS solution. If anything i've lost valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. Especially when stuff starts going wrong or i have to schedule time to manually apply OS/Runtime security updates. > The cloud has made otherwise smart people into unthinking drones. The cloud has allowed smart people to focus th…

It’s fiction that configuring the cloud is easier than configuring a computer. I’ve worked at big companies with smart people who burn days and weeks trying to get IAM, gateways, vpcs, firewalls and lambda to play together. Let alone the ongoing nightmare of ops/dev interaction. Complete cloud fiction. The worst problem is the giant pile of cloud spaghetti you end up with and no one has any idea what connects to what…

To be blunt that sounds like operator inexperience. Throw someone who's spent their life setting up Windows servers on a Linux box and you'd hear similar resentments.

At the end of the day you still need to configure the instances for things like auto scaling, security patches, logging and so on. IAM & VPC still come into the mix when running on EC2, so you've avoided nothing.

Post reply on HN