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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

#121

Post by adam_arthur »

algorithmmonkey wrote: post #119
phphphphp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

Yes, exactly. Of course experimentation and competition is good to settle on a solid set of building blocks, but in the long run serverless code should absolutely be portable between vendors.

There's a strong incentive for vendors to not allow this as it reduces their pricing power... But think we will see it eventually one way or another.

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

#122

Post by nl »

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?

You can do that on Lambda: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/golang-handler....

AWS still needs the container/runtime to stop your code getting access to other things on the same physical computer.

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

#124

Post by tedk-42 »

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…

Hmmm I had a look into WASM runtimes and the idea seems interesting to deploy something on a server as a lightweight execution environment (I think of Firecracker from AWS for VMs).

To be honest on the server side of things containers are so nice because 99% of the time they include all your dependencies you need to run the app.

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

#125

Post by bradgessler »

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’d be interested in building the bootstrapped “git push and we build and publish”, aka “heroku for static site compilers”

Chime in if you’d like to be one of the first few customers. If there’s enough interest here’s how I’d play it:

1. I won’t raise VC money. I know how to build a SaaS business without it—I bootstrapped Poll Everywhere from $0 to $10m+.

2. My motivations these days are to build low complexity products. Ideally they’re “evergreen”, meaning I can ship a core feature set that I know will be the same in 10 years. The feature I’m selling their is stability.

3. I like to price things in a way that makes them accessible to as many people as possible while being sustainable for the business so it can operate for a long time with the support it needs for customers.

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

#126

Post by wizwit999 »

kitd wrote: post #64
wizwit999 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31085357

That's discussing their subhosting offering, which is unrelated to the subject of this thread, the actual runtime.

You're being dense, that's from this thread, and explains this Netlify offering uses Deno's Deploy infrastructure.

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

#127

Post by danamit »

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…

in what world is serverless cheaper?

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

#128

Post by jamestanderson »

foxbarrington wrote: post #76
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #46

Netlify pricing has always been confusing to me, but I'm not entirely sure why. I guess I'm more accustomed to pay-as-you-go in this space (CFW) than tiered plans (Netlify bundles their features into starter/pro/business). It seems that the free plan is 3M invocations/mo, starter is 15M/mo, and business is 150M/mo, but there aren't any ways to increase those limits (business says to contact them for higher limits). P…

Netlify's creative pricing is what lost me as a customer. They decided to start reading our git commits to decide how much to charge us. Instead of charging for usage of bandwidth and build minutes they decided to charge based on how many different authors we had--even though those people never interacted with Netlify or even knew how we were deployed. If we didn't hurry up and migrate to Render.com this would have t…

Wow - really surprised at this move by Netlify. It looks like that's a new policy[1] where a "Member" is not just someone who can log in to the Netlify UI and manage a site, but anyone who can trigger a build.

Relevant quote from the article outlining the policy changes:

> For sites connected to private Git repositories on Pro and Business teams, Git contributors will need to be team members in order to trigger builds.

> Teams will only be billed for the number of team members. Currently, Git contributors are people who trigger builds on your team’s site(s). Moving forward, in order to trigger builds, Git contributors who aren’t Team Members, such as people in the ‘Contributors via Git’ section, Reviewers, or people not on the team entirely, will need to have their deploy approved by a team Owner.

> Once their deploy is approved, they’ll be invited to become a Team Member and can deploy without approval from then on. If their deploy is rejected, their build won’t run and they will not be added as a team member to your monthly bill.

> This change does not apply to sites linked to public repositories or sites on Starter or Open Source plan teams.

So it sounds like you could limit your costs by limiting your team Owners.

This pricing doesn't seem like a good value proposition to me. I see Netlify as a web host and CDN which has products very comparable to some of Cloudflare's products. In those spaces billing is generally based on usage, not number of seats.

What you get from Netlify doesn't scale with the number of seats you pay for.

If I have 1 member on the Business plan I'll pay $99/mo and get 1.5TB of bandwidth per month. If I have 5 members on the Business plan, I'll pay $495/mo and still only get 1.5TB of bandwidth. Hardly seems fair or reasonable.

[1] https://answers.netlify.com/t/upcoming-changes-to-netlify-pl...

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

#129

Post by tauwauwau »

_ben_ wrote: post #118
melony wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lat…

I was looking at the polyscale docs and found following

  PolyScale evaluates each SQL query in real-time and when it detects a DML query i.e. a SQL INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE, it extracts the associated tables for the query. Then, all data for the table(s) in question are purged from the cache, for every region globally.
at https://docs.polyscale.ai/how-does-it-work/#smart-invalidati...

Isn't clearing cache for entire tables for a all DMLs which may be changing one record too intensive and how does this affect performance of cache when there are multiple DML queries being run every minute?

Also can you please give the docs link to connection pooling feature

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

#130

Post by oefrha »

paulgb wrote: post #52
forty wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything running JS comes with some TS support, you just have to transpile it before releasing :) I'm not sure why shipping the transpiler on the production server rather than keeping it in your CI is a good idea, but I think that's what Deno is doing.

> I'm not sure why shipping the transpiler on the production server rather than keeping it in your CI is a good idea, but I think that's what Deno is doing. IMHO, the decoupling of build step and runtime step in JavaScript was a terrible mistake. I've wasted hours just trying to find tsconfig settings that are compatible with the other parts I'm using. Shipping a transpiler with a known-good configuration alongside t…

> I've wasted hours just trying to find tsconfig settings that are compatible with the other parts I'm using.

Deno only “solves” that problem by not having a legacy ecosystem, and that’s only if you stick to the happy path of only using modules with first class Deno support. If you try to tap into the vast Node ecosystem, where Deno’s lacking, through e.g. esm.dev, you can waste hours just as easily. Even packages that claim Deno support sometimes have minor problems.

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