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Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

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Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#101

Post by markhaslam »

lucacasonato wrote: post #83
markhaslam wrote: post #70

What are the cold start times like? Compared to say Cloudflare Workers where they claim you can have no cold starts?

Deno Deploy ( https://deno.com/deploy ) uses the same optimizations as CFW to achieve effectively 0ms cold starts. Netlify Edge Functions are still in beta and don't have all of the same optimizations yet, but we're going to be working with Netlify over the next few months to enable these optimizations to Netlify Edge Functions too.

Thank you! That’s so impressive that you are able to achieve 0 ms cold starts in Deno Deploy. That and CFWs are game changers.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#102

Post by paulgb »

deckard1 wrote: post #98
paulgb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead it seems like a buzzword (?) for a weirdly niche way of running things that someone with a 4 Euro/Month nginx instance that hosts 10 websites will probably never understand. To me, serverless means that I as the developer don't have to do ongoing server maintenance work. A 4 Euro/month setup sounds great, until you find out that you never enabled log rotation and filled up the disk space, or your certificat…

> but should work the same at the infrastructure layer in a year Serious doubt, there. This brave new world seems to be entirely focused on making it an incredibly fragile world with your code scattered to the winds. It's bad enough dealing with library semver breakages in a monolithic app. I can't imagine tracking a dozen serverless functions running god-knows-where with whatever resources some cloud service decides…

> but should work the same at the infrastructure layer in a year

It's been my experience. For example, I've had periodic data fetching jobs last for years without giving them any thought. In some cases I've gone back years later and found them still chugging away, obediently putting data where I told them to years earlier. The one exception I can think of is when Lambda EOL'd Python 2.7, but that happened about 12 years after Python 3's initial release.

I've found the same to be true of web services. I have one that's been running continuously for 5+ years that I actually forgot about until just now.

> wheeze

Why?

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#103

Post by dbbk »

cxr wrote: post #57
dbbk wrote: post #36

I would love to jump over to something like Vercel or Netlify Edge, but maddeningly none of these platforms give you control over the cache key. I have pages that are server-side rendered with Cache-Control headers, but because our visitors come with unique tracking params on the end of their URL (e.g. from Mailchimp or Branch), we would essentially have no cache hits. It seems the only way to have control over this…

> There must be a better way? You're experiencing friction trying to use something in a way that it's supposed to not be used. (I.e., click-tracking by junking up URLs.) You could look for an answer, or you could take a step back, evaluate your expectations, and then decide not to do what you're trying to do.

Unfortunately this is an enormous business and asking them to stop all tracking is well outside of my remit.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#104

Post by dbbk »

ascorbic wrote: post #55
dbbk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks... do you have any docs on how we might achieve this with Next.js? Am I right in thinking we would have essentially a custom Edge Function first that handles query params, and then a second Edge Function that renders the Next app?

I work at Netlify on framework integrations. Next has beta support for running the whole app at the edge, and Netlify supports that. If you create you own custom edge functions they will run first, so you can do just that. You can also run Next "normally" (i.e. in the node-based Netlify Functions) and run your own edge functions in front of that. In those you can modify the Request in any way you'd like, before passi…

Yeah I'm very intrigued by running the whole app on the edge (in their Edge Runtime).

This sounds pretty promising. I'll take a dive and see if I can get it working, thanks for the tip!

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#105

Post by wmf »

manquer wrote: post #78
wmf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like Netlify is essentially reselling a third-party service here. Isn't operating infrastructure Netlify's job? Why outsource this? Can requests end up taking circuitous paths where Netlify and Deno's infra don't line up?

Netlify also uses aws and rackspace . They are in the business of selling PaaS on top of IaaS by adding value to developer workflows . They could host their own infra at large enough scale when that makes sense, the same way AWS decided after many years to make their own chips (graviton), but that is not their core identity like AWS is not a chip manufacturer.

It looks like Netlify is essentially reselling Deno Deploy as is, not building a higher-level service on top of it. And latency matters in CDNs.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#106

Post by ksajadi »

Netlify for me is a prime example of a great company gone wrong by raising too much VC money. The basic product of Netlify is a great one: build and host static sites without the need to mess with any of the tech stack. For us developer folk, this should be easy: run the build command of any static site generator and stick the results into an S3 bucket. And yet, something as simple as this became so popular with even developer companies (see Hashicorp’s quotes on Netlify).

This could have been a great story but then tons and tons of VC money came in and now you’d have to think of ways to make the valuation worth it and make the product sticky: so now we have edge Deno powered functions, lambda-esq applications, form embedded HTML and so much other features that are used by the long tail of their customer base while they changed their price to charge by git committees and have daily short downtimes of 1 to 5 mins for the past month (monitored by external services, as they wouldn’t reflect that in their status page).

Soon, they’ll sell the company to some corp like Akamai or similar “enterprise” outfit leaving us high and dry.

There is a lot of money in building businesses that do boring stuff that just makes peoples lives easier. But when you take VC money, you’d need to build a moat to fend off cloud providers from the bottom, capture the value for the top from developers and everything in between.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#107

Post by [deleted] »

api wrote: post #81
lewisjoe wrote: post #5

This is great news. I'm really rooting for a successful trend of Serverless runtimes, mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs. While the general trend today is to back the serverless environment with Javascript runtimes (Cloudflare runs its edge on top of V8, Netlify uses deno, most other serverless runtimes use nodejs), I'm optimistic that WebAssembly will take over this space eventually, for a bunc…

> I'm really rooting for a successful trend of Serverless runtimes, mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs. How would that work? Don't these tend to facilitate cloud lock-in or at least be cloud-only in the sense that they make it hard to operate your own metal infrastructure?

[deleted]

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#108

Post by ahmed_ds »

lucacasonato wrote: post #12
ignoramous wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Netlify running Deno on their edge and not on Deno.com Deploy 's? Is this also what Slack, Vercel (?), and Supabase do?

Netlify and Supabase use Deno's infrastructure for code execution ( https://deno.com/deploy/subhosting ). Vercel hosts their edge functions on Cloudflare (nothing to do with Deno). Slack's Deno runtime is hosted on AWS.

This is really great to see an open source project coming up with a viable business plan to support the project development.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#109

Post by anyfactor »

the_common_man wrote: post #3

This is a new concept for me, what is the use case for edge functions?

I was was told to use firebase cloud functions literally yesterday.

You can pre-parse and pre-process JSON responses to minimize the payload size and customize it for your frontend needs. Makes dealing with client secrets and configuration easier too I believe. I didn't want to rewrite a bunch of backend code so this was one of the simplest solution.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#110

Post by madeofpalk »

ksajadi wrote: post #106

Netlify for me is a prime example of a great company gone wrong by raising too much VC money. The basic product of Netlify is a great one: build and host static sites without the need to mess with any of the tech stack. For us developer folk, this should be easy: run the build command of any static site generator and stick the results into an S3 bucket. And yet, something as simple as this became so popular with even…

I think this is a natural and fine extension of the Netlify platform. They've had various "serverless functions" for a few years that's mostly been out of the way if you don't need it.

It fits within their goal of a 'heroku for frontend websites', for easily deploying sites.

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