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A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

bref.sh

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Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#11

Post by stronglikedan »

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…

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.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#12

Post by mikece »

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…

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.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#14

Post by romanhn »

bogota wrote: post #9
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

I mean, it's not like that sentiment is totally baseless. I've used PHP years ago and both language and core libraries were not well-designed and came with many footguns. I've heard that modern PHP with frameworks like Laravel fixed a bunch of this, so presumably it's quite capable these days. But PHP certainly wouldn't be anywhere near the top of my go-to list at this point.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#16

Post by mikece »

neatze wrote: post #6

In second part (Refactoring to serverless microservices) where is database in there ?

I'm going to guess that that database moved to RDS and, once there, was likely refactored as services were decomposed to microservices... but that's not mentioned in the article.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#17

Post by cogman10 »

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.

This was my thought. Lambda works well for infrequent tasks. But hosting an API? That seems like it could get expensive pretty fast.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#18

Post by joshstrange »

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 of half-implemented things, etc.

I wouldn't lift-and-shift the PHP app I work on, it requires too many FreeBSD-specific/custom underlying services but I could make use of lambda for certain tasks while leveraging the PHP code we already have. We use SST for for some NodeJS (TypeScript) lambdas that have been very popular but PHP isn't going anywhere in our stack so I'd love to find a way to move the bursty parts of it to lambda.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#19

Post by agentultra »

Curious if they have spikey latency from cold starts? The authorization calls have a time budget but it's pretty generous so maybe a nothing-burger there? How do they keep authorization context fresh enough for the lambda performing it?

Also... what has the bill been like? I've used Lambda for side-car data migration projects but I'd be surprised if it saved money over a beefy co-located or cloud server if your volume is generally constant.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#20

Post by mjburgess »

mikece wrote: post #12
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…

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
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