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Serverless Map/Reduce

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Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#141

Post by Can_Not »

edblarney wrote: post #126
aikah wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fight the good fight, you're not the only one standing up against this ridiculous moniker. Never back down. Keep calling out the bullshit every time and everywhere this term is promoted. People ask "what's the big deal?" well the big deal is ,calling a service "serverless" is both a lie and misleading for marketing purposes.

It's not a lie, and it's not misleading. The concept of 'server' loses all meaning in this given architecture. You create 'Lambdas' - units of functionality - and they do that they are supposed to do entirely independent of the underlying architecture. In fact, using the concept of 'server' in a Lambda situation probably obfuscates the situation and adds unnecessary complexity. A 'server' is an implementation detail…

All of that is running on a server, connecting to a server, etc.. If this is "serverless", then any random cpanel host has been doing "serverless" php/mysql for 20 years.

So it is, in fact, both a lie and misleading.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#142

Post by jeffbarr »

twagner wrote: post #133
willcodeforfoo wrote: post #66

I wonder if Amazon will ever open Lambda up to any Docker image? (I know it's possible to run binaries, but its a bit of a pain to compile with the Amazon AMI, etc.) Being able to have a bunch of `docker run` with any image would be pretty powerful.

Yes. First step was https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-linux-container-... . Layering Lambda's image on top of that to assist people building and testing is definitely on our roadmap.

Good to know :-)

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#143

Post by Can_Not »

edblarney wrote: post #127
yumaikas wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better term would be FAAS (Functions as a service), since that's what it is. Lambda looks kinda neat as far as tech goes however.

The term 'Lambda' has a basis in Computer Science as a type of 'anonymous function' - in which case the name is reasonably well suited. 'Serverless Computing' as a term to describe the paradigm I think is very neutral, descriptive and apt. It's even a little bit boring but it does the job.

How is it apt and descriptive, and also not blatently wrong and misleading, if the name explicitly suggests that servers are executing code "without a server"?

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#144

Post by Can_Not »

res0nat0r wrote: post #132
badminton1 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With my car dealer, I maintain exactly zero factories. Zero physical factories. Zero factory workers. It's perfectly reasonable IMO for that to be called "factory-less car".

Why is everyone here so upset about the word "serverless"? It's exactly what it says: You aren't responsible for maintaining any OS or server. That's it.

We are upset because we're being told that it is serverless, then there are clearly servers anyways.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#145

Post by Jdam »

ronack wrote: post #20
teej wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just restructured a job to be parallel and run on Lambda and I couldn't be happier. Glad to see this idea is gaining mindshare. I found that it was easy to test, easy to debug, easy to maintain, not very expensive, and just kinda worked. The only caveat for those considering taking this path - AWS has an account-wide limit of 100 concurrent lambdas running at once. There's no way to know how many are currently runn…

We had it raised to several thousand concurrent requests with no questions asked. YMMV based on age of account, amount of spend, etc.

I once wanted to raise the limit of g2 instances from 2 to 100 in us-east-1 and the reply from the customer agent was he first "has to check if that does not affect overall region stability" WTF Anyway, it was raised a couple of days later.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#146

Post by autotune »

PetahNZ wrote: post #135
autotune wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would just set up a new account for each student, have them use their own billing info, have them use the free tier, teach them how to set up billing alerts, and let them go to town. They're going to need to learn to take cost into account when working at a real job with AWS so this is the best way to teach them to take accountability.

I'm not sure its reasonable to expect your students to have a credit card.

Depends on the age group. Anyway most could get a secured credit card if needed.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#147

Post by danso »

autotune wrote: post #146
PetahNZ wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure its reasonable to expect your students to have a credit card.

Depends on the age group. Anyway most could get a secured credit card if needed.

Yeah that's the thing. Most students do have a credit card. But I've had a few who are very much against it, for financial or privacy reasons. For me, it's not worth compelling them to change their ways (which I'm highly sympathetic to) for what could amount to as little as $5 of AWS costs.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#148

Post by CephalopodMD »

danso wrote: post #50

OT: I teach computational methods and even as much as I dislike teaching/conflating it with web dev, I have included "let's build a web app" because students like building and deploying a thing, and because Heroku has a free tier. I've considered the possibility of having students do things on AWS (beyond web dev), including Lambda, and just expensing the costs. It seems feasible to quickly set up every student with…

I am taking a cloud computing class. We each use our own account and have registered for some free educational aws credits that come with the student developer pack. I think teachers can also request credits as well since we get an extra $40 or so from the prof. Whenever a student accidentally leaves an m4xlarge on for a week, which happens occasionally, he just calls up amazon support, explains what happened, and usually they'll fix it up if it doesn't happen too often.

If you go serverless though, it's probably not going to be an issue. I would be amazed if a student used more than $10 doing anything with lambda.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#149

Post by edblarney »

Can_Not wrote: post #143
edblarney wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term 'Lambda' has a basis in Computer Science as a type of 'anonymous function' - in which case the name is reasonably well suited. 'Serverless Computing' as a term to describe the paradigm I think is very neutral, descriptive and apt. It's even a little bit boring but it does the job.

How is it apt and descriptive, and also not blatently wrong and misleading, if the name explicitly suggests that servers are executing code "without a server"?

From the customers perspective -> there is no server.

The primary difference between and Lambda architecture and a 'serverless architecture' is that the app-maker does not spend any effort, though, or concern in managing servers.

That there may or may not be servers under the hood is irrelevant.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#150

Post by marktangotango »

IanCal wrote: post #136
etrain wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that with EC2 you're billed hourly so the fastest a 70 cpu-hour job could finish on m3.medium for $0.70 is 1 hour, and that's ignoring setup time, etc. Meanwhile, on Lambda, you can actually run 1600 60s jobs (or 27 CPU-hours) in 3 minutes. This is inclusive of setup time, job submission, stragglers, etc. [1] Of course, if you've got sustained load, it's cheaper to go with spot instances, but the "occasi…

As a note for people, if your constraints are a bit different then these are some services to check out: Joyent Manta: https://www.joyent.com/manta Hyper: http://hyper.sh Possibly Joyent Triton: https://www.joyent.com/triton I personally often want to run a bunch of things for ~1-15 minutes, and have too much data or setup to fit neatly in a lambda function. However, I don't need 1000 things running simultaneously, a…

How secure are docker hosts like hyper.sh? I've always been skeptical, the multitenant docker security story hasn't been very encouraging, or has that changed?
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