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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

#22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I get voted down because I actually agreed with keeping PHP rather than changing languages? I don't care about the karma points, just curious if someone thought I was attacking PHP because they didn't read the whole comment.

it would be nice if HN had a random "explain your vote" mode where voters had to choose from, eg., agree, helpful, insightful, etc. vs. disagree, unhelpful, provocative

I will admit that I've made trolling comments from time to time which get well-deserved vote-downs, but there are certainly times where I would like to know what the point of disagreement is because if I'm missing a point of view from which I could learn I would like to know!

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#24
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 AW…

Interesting to re-read that article again and see that technologies he cites as so cutting edge you're spending innovation tokens on them are now mainstream and very well understood. What would the new "you can use those but you're spending innovation tokens!" technologies would be. Rust? AI? CGP?

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#25

I'd really like to play with Bref but it more or less requires using serverless framework from what I understand as there are no guides on how to get it working with something like SST. I've used serverless framework before and I won't touch it again. It seems like a complete dead end with the team behind it more or less giving up on it to go work on a cloud backend alternative to lambda/etc. Docs were a mess, lot's…

You can deploy using the CDK for example: https://bref.sh/docs/deploy/aws-cdk

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#27
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…

Perhaps we're finally at a point on HN where people realize there's no need to question the use of PHP. it's a robust, capable language that's just as, or more, suitable for the majority of use cases as any other language.

I think most of that was coming from the (then) next generation JS crowd who was trying to fit everything into one neat little box. They've since burnt themselves out and found the limitations in their approach during the process.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#28
I have no clues about what's better but as a french I'm amazed by the idea to delegate banking operations to a cloud provider. Last time I worked in bank IT political requirement and good practices were using their own private physical network infrastructure over all the country and data storage server rooms were literally bunkers with armed security.

Is it that common around the world and 'we' just happen to have been overkill on security or do they are not really a true 'bank' and more a payment provider ?

that seems such a change from some years ago were cost were totally the last of the issues against security.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#29
I wonder why they went with AWS Lambda and PHP instead of something serverless-native like Cloudflare Workers? I guess they still have some critical parts of the legacy stack on AWS (DBs especially, but also other AWS services).

I wonder if you can build something like this entirely greenfield today, like what you'd use as a permanent data store for all the transactions, without having to manage the scaling of each individual microservice. Would CF Workers + Durable Objects be able to handle something like that?

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#30
post #28

I have no clues about what's better but as a french I'm amazed by the idea to delegate banking operations to a cloud provider. Last time I worked in bank IT political requirement and good practices were using their own private physical network infrastructure over all the country and data storage server rooms were literally bunkers with armed security. Is it that common around the world and 'we' just happen to have be…

It's way worse than you think. A large number of Swiss banks including Swiss banking regulators store all their data on Google Cloud.
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