Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

netlify.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 166 posts

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

#111

Post by manquer »

wmf wrote: post #105
manquer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just integrating into their own workflows and other apps could be sufficient value, only time will tell.

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

#112

Post by throwthere »

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 guess Netlify still offers the basic static site hosting, which can be anything from drag-drop to easy to set up automated github deployments. I mean, it's not like Netlify offers a worse static hosting service post-funding, right? With VC funding they've just built out more features. Not to mention I think they've always aimed to build out the "JAM" stack and support as many frameworks as possible.

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

#113

Post by melony »

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…

The problem is database. Distributed serverless-first SQL like spanner, Cockroach, PlanetScale are very very expensive.

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

#114

Post by qbasic_forever »

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #68
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…

Really, really dumb question. I've seen a lot of node/python/etc serverless offerings. Is there something where you just provide a binary and its executed each time? For example, I write a simple single responsibility piece of code in Go `add_to_cart.go` and build it, deploy it, and somehow map it to some network request. dot slash pass args, and return the result? No need to have containers or runtime?

Find a cheap apache web host that allows cgi-bin.

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

#115

Post by agrippanux »

hobo_mark wrote: post #14
robertlagrant wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Any useful pros and cons vs Cloudflare Workers?

Workers can have persistent storage attached to them (as a KV store), I can't see whether this has anything similar.

Also Workers can talk to Durable Objects which is super nice

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

#116

Post by 3np »

throwthere wrote: post #112
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 guess Netlify still offers the basic static site hosting, which can be anything from drag-drop to easy to set up automated github deployments. I mean, it's not like Netlify offers a worse static hosting service post-funding, right? With VC funding they've just built out more features. Not to mention I think they've always aimed to build out the "JAM" stack and support as many frameworks as possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025183

No experience from the Netlify of old to compare with, though.

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

#117

Post by presentation »

paulgb wrote: post #102
deckard1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ye…

Agreed, my company focuses on writing business logic that actually provides value to our customers, spends roughly 0 time configuring web infrastructure, and everything just works, our cloud costs are dirt cheap (especially when compared to cost of labor), the performance is better than if we had used a traditional server since code is being run on servers very near our users rather than a fixed location, and we save time, stress and money by not needing to hire cynical, behind the times sysadmins like deckard1.

Maybe that wouldn’t be the case if my company wasn’t a B2B SaaS that isn’t constrained by being the scaling concerns of a mass market consumer web app (specifically one that couldn’t scale via smart caching policies, which honestly is a minority of use cases), but for our use case it makes plenty of sense.

If you’re worried about cost overruns from auto scaling, you just set a billing limit and deal with it when you get close. Anyway the code we push to serverless is literally just the business logic we would have written anyway so there’s virtually no platform lock-in. And honestly my serverless costs are so cheap that it’ll be a long while before we bother touching them.

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

#118

Post by _ben_ »

melony wrote: post #113
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…

The problem is database. Distributed serverless-first SQL like spanner, Cockroach, PlanetScale are very very expensive.

We're building PolyScale[1] to address this problem. PolyScale is a serverless edge cache for databases so you can easily distribute your reads.

We are opening up early access to our connection pooling features in the next couple of weeks which allows FaaS platforms like Netlify, Cloudflare etc to create large numbers of ephemeral connections, without impacting your origin database, as well as reducing connection latency significantly.

[1] https://www.polyscale.ai/

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

#119

Post by algorithmmonkey »

phphphphp wrote: post #97
adam_arthur wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a common spec for serverless is badly needed. Serverless code should be portable between different cloud providers, otherwise there's vendor lock in and much greater opportunity to price gouge. Anybody know if a common API for serverless components is being worked on?

Check out knative, it’s used for Google Cloud Run: https://knative.dev/docs/

What is the common spec for Knative? It seems like one runs an app as normal in a container and then the special scaling sauce is handled by Knative.

When I think of a portable spec for serverless, I think of something more like a Trait of an Interface that needs to be implemented, less a app hosting model. If you think about it like that, then Web Assembly component model [1] would be a great fit for defining an interface that could be implemented in a variety of languages.

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

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

#120

Post by rmbyrro »

yurishimo wrote: post #85
rmbyrro wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would the Lady prefer to let her site go down? I don't understand this way of thinking. One of the main benefits of serverless is scalability, peace of mind for precisely when you go viral. If you're doing something good, especially if you're selling something good, all you want is to go viral. And of you went viral, you don't mind paying the AWS costs, which should be tiny compared to your revenue. Just need to care…

Sure, but I think the GP was referring to a situation where revenue doesn’t match the traffic. Imagine the grandma scenario. Let’s say that she cooks and sells artisanal jams and jellies. With the help of her granddaughter, she creates a TikTok that goes viral. Her web store immediately sells out, and the traffic from the video hammers her website. She cannot react fast enough to enable back orders and so most of tho…

Then get peoples emails to notify when stock is up again.

The worst thing it could happen is having your site down when many people want what you have.

In any business, the hardest part and most expensive, by far, is sales and marketing.

You wanna throw it all away to save 100 bucks on Amazon? That's insane!..

Post reply on HN