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A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

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Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#2

Post by willsmith72 »

I always love a story about a successful strangler pattern migration.

I do wonder how they came to Lambda though. I love it for small workloads and highly variable demand services, but something like Treezor you'd think has relatively flat and high demand. The cloud cost for Lambda would be much higher than running the equivalent compute, even with something also highly scalable like ECS.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#3

Post by ceejayoz »

willsmith72 wrote: post #2

I always love a story about a successful strangler pattern migration. I do wonder how they came to Lambda though. I love it for small workloads and highly variable demand services, but something like Treezor you'd think has relatively flat and high demand. The cloud cost for Lambda would be much higher than running the equivalent compute, even with something also highly scalable like ECS.

We use Lambda (via Laravel Vapor; https://vapor.laravel.com/) for a big analytics batch processing job every night; it spawns hundreds of thousands of individual jobs that make various API calls, but only for a few minutes. For the rest of the day it's doing very little.

I'd imagine a bank has quite a few of these sorts of bursty bash processing needs; ACHes, end-of-day reconciliation, etc.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#4

Post by mikece »

I don't know which surprises me more: that they continued to use PHP in their move to serverless/microservices or that nobody else on HN has questioned this point yet. I totally get why they would keep PHP: they have the language/platform experience already and AWS supports it (which is really more than enough to silence the "You should have switched to {other_language}!" partisans). Plus, I imaging non-trivial amounts of copy & paste of proven functions was key to moving from monolith to Lambdas... why change the code if it works?

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#5

Post by yaseer »

mikece wrote: post #4

I don't know which surprises me more: that they continued to use PHP in their move to serverless/microservices or that nobody else on HN has questioned this point yet. I totally get why they would keep PHP: they have the language/platform experience already and AWS supports it (which is really more than enough to silence the "You should have switched to {other_language}!" partisans). Plus, I imaging non-trivial amoun…

I'm wondering if PHP's reputation has been rehabilitated somewhat in recent years. At least amongst those who understand the significant changes in modern PHP, and the difference a stable framework like Laravel makes.

I've found PHP with Laravel a stable and solid workhorse. Good for getting things done quickly, and then a stable system over time.

In contrast, I've gradually become disillusioned with the node.js and JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem over the years. You can build quickly, but the systems turns into a pain to maintain and update.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#7

Post by justinsaccount »

mikece wrote: post #4

I don't know which surprises me more: that they continued to use PHP in their move to serverless/microservices or that nobody else on HN has questioned this point yet. I totally get why they would keep PHP: they have the language/platform experience already and AWS supports it (which is really more than enough to silence the "You should have switched to {other_language}!" partisans). Plus, I imaging non-trivial amoun…

It also makes sense if you look at things in the context of Choose Boring Technology [1]. If you have a working PHP app and want to scale into the cloud, you can use a single innovation token to move the app into lambda. This is the key sentence:

> To do a controlled migration, the team deployed the application both to the servers and to AWS Lambda. Only 10 lines of code needed to be changed to run the monolith on AWS Lambda.

[1] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#9

Post by bogota »

mikece wrote: post #4

I don't know which surprises me more: that they continued to use PHP in their move to serverless/microservices or that nobody else on HN has questioned this point yet. I totally get why they would keep PHP: they have the language/platform experience already and AWS supports it (which is really more than enough to silence the "You should have switched to {other_language}!" partisans). Plus, I imaging non-trivial amoun…

hur dur php bad because they told me
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