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Session-lived Application Backends

driftingin.space

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Re: Session-lived Application Backends

#7

Post by ignoramous »

Congrats on the funding and soft launch.

I'm a believer in serverless, and think it could be better still! The continued progress of companies like darklang, replit, singlestore, planetscale (to name a few) have been super exciting.

And so: How'd you compare your approach with James Cowling's convex.dev which is a slightly different take on marrying data with serverless [0]? Thanks.

[0] https://docs.convex.dev/guide/convex-fundamentals/intro

Re: Session-lived Application Backends

#8

Post by paulgb »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #6

It seems that CloudFlare’s Durable Objects are another take on solving this problem. Any thoughts on comparisons/contrasts between this and Durable Objects?

I think Durable Objects is a great product and Cloudflare have been ahead of the curve on this trend. The main difference is that the unit of code is a container image rather than a JS/WASM bundle, so you can run just about anything in there (we’ve run instances of Chrome and an OLAP database). We’re mainly focused on use cases where developers want a more powerful compute environment than they have in the browser, so we wanted to be as unrestrictive as possible about what runs in it.

The other difference is that it’s open source. We’re also working on a managed version for people who don’t want to manage a cluster, but we don’t want to tie developers to a managed platform without an open source on/off ramp.

Re: Session-lived Application Backends

#9

Post by paulgb »

ignoramous wrote: post #7

Congrats on the funding and soft launch. I'm a believer in serverless, and think it could be better still! The continued progress of companies like darklang, replit, singlestore, planetscale (to name a few) have been super exciting. And so: How'd you compare your approach with James Cowling's convex.dev which is a slightly different take on marrying data with serverless [0]? Thanks. [0] https://docs.convex.dev/guide/…

Thanks! Convex looks neat, and you’re right, there is a lot going on at the data and data/frontend layer. Our approach is to provide a generic compute layer with the session-lived backend model, so you can do more than just store data with it.

Re: Session-lived Application Backends

#10

Post by ignoramous »

paulgb wrote: post #9
ignoramous wrote: post #7

Congrats on the funding and soft launch. I'm a believer in serverless, and think it could be better still! The continued progress of companies like darklang, replit, singlestore, planetscale (to name a few) have been super exciting. And so: How'd you compare your approach with James Cowling's convex.dev which is a slightly different take on marrying data with serverless [0]? Thanks. [0] https://docs.convex.dev/guide/…

Thanks! Convex looks neat, and you’re right, there is a lot going on at the data and data/frontend layer. Our approach is to provide a generic compute layer with the session-lived backend model, so you can do more than just store data with it.

So, I presume, instead of a shared multi-tenant architecture convex), Spawner prefers per-user business-logic container + a per-user database container (+ any other module)? If so, once a user-session is adjudged to have been over, does Spawner snapshot them all to restore it whenever a session is to be resumed?
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