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Rethinking serverless with FLAME

fly.io

11–20 of 153 posts

Re: Rethinking serverless with FLAME

#11
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different types of concerns. Software engineers are most often concerned with writing software, not managing security settings, configuring services, and updating things. If you could declaratively write a single file which configures your server for you and then just copy paste that server state to 10,000 other servers, I'd be happy (you can, in fact, do this!)

Because they are not concerned with those things, the lack of knowledge in those areas creeps in. If you don’t understand how the OS works at a very fundamental level, you will write sub-optimal code. This is usually fine, because people are smart, compilers are good, and hardware is absurdly fast. However, the fact remains that it’s probably giving up some bits here and there. More germane to my point, though, the a…

All true, but you've got a few issues:

- Flame still assumes you have a server somewhere- this is purely for elastic workloads.

- Dynamically scaling horizontally is not something "linux" can do for you: It's a legitimately hard problem because of all the usual distributed systems difficulties.

- Often, there are workloads that are only needed occasionally but also have very different resource needs than the rest of the system. Being forced to not only create a new version of your application, but additionally a bespoke server setup and dedicated VM/Container image for that case takes something that could be trivial in the Flame model, and makes it take hours even for someone experienced.

Basically, you really should've read the article first.

Re: Rethinking serverless with FLAME

#14
post #4

[flagged]

Different types of concerns. Software engineers are most often concerned with writing software, not managing security settings, configuring services, and updating things. If you could declaratively write a single file which configures your server for you and then just copy paste that server state to 10,000 other servers, I'd be happy (you can, in fact, do this!)

You'd love NixOS. It lets you do exactly that.

Re: Rethinking serverless with FLAME

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different types of concerns. Software engineers are most often concerned with writing software, not managing security settings, configuring services, and updating things. If you could declaratively write a single file which configures your server for you and then just copy paste that server state to 10,000 other servers, I'd be happy (you can, in fact, do this!)

You'd love NixOS. It lets you do exactly that.

I have yet to outgrow docker or kubernetes so far, they work really well for me. All my local dev I just do on Windows

Re: Rethinking serverless with FLAME

#17

Pretty cool idea, and that api is awesome. > CPU bound work like video transcoding can quickly bring our entire service to a halt in production Couldn't you just autoscale your app based on cpu though?

Yes and no: Maybe the rest of your workloads don't require much CPU- you only need this kind of power for one or two workloads, and you don't want them getting crowded out by other work potentially.

Or they require a GPU.

Or your core service only needs 1-2 servers, but you need to scale up to dozens/hundreds/thousands on demand, for work that only happens maybe once a day.

Re: Rethinking serverless with FLAME

#18
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different types of concerns. Software engineers are most often concerned with writing software, not managing security settings, configuring services, and updating things. If you could declaratively write a single file which configures your server for you and then just copy paste that server state to 10,000 other servers, I'd be happy (you can, in fact, do this!)

You'd love NixOS. It lets you do exactly that.

While Nix is cool and I think the model of the future, it doesn't obviate the need for elastic workloads on demand without wanting to dedicate a ton of time.

Re: Rethinking serverless with FLAME

#20
Very interesting concept, however it's a bit soured by the fact that Container-based FaaS is never mentioned, and it removes a decent chunk of the negatives around FaaS. Yeah you still need to deal with the communication layer (probably with managed services such as SQS or Pub/Sub), but there's no proprietary runtime needed, no rewrites needed between local/remote runtime environments.
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