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Serverless Map/Reduce

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Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#151

Post by Can_Not »

edblarney wrote: post #149
Can_Not wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By that logic, linode, shared webhosts, and facebook are all serverless.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#152

Post by edblarney »

Can_Not wrote: post #151
edblarney wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By that logic, linode, shared webhosts, and facebook are all serverless.

No.

Nobody ever used a social network and had to manage servers to do it, or ever referred to servers, nor where they implied.

Using a 'social network' has nothing to do with servers.

Managing back end infrastructure is fundamentally a 'server oriented' paradigm.

'Electric cars' are a perfectly apt name to refer to cars that are not gas/cylinder engines, just as 'steel roofing' is perfectly apt to differentiate from the standard tar based products at least in consumer roofing (in cold climes).

Salesforce's mantra for a long time was 'no software' - which was reasonable because IT departments didn't have to install and manage software, although obviously salesforce themselves use 'software'.

'Serverless computing' is a perfectly fine name, 99% are fine with it, they know what it means, and it has nothing to do with Amazon's marketing initiatives. In fact - Amazon is way behind in positioning it - they are not even properly catering to hosting websites using the service, they are still mostly focused on IT folks.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#153

Post by res0nat0r »

Can_Not wrote: post #144
res0nat0r wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No need to dig into the weeds or wax poetic on the term, people call it serverless because you, the user, don't have to manage any servers personally when you use the "serverless" application.

It sounds like the dislike comes from folks here who just want to be contrary is all.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#154

Post by Can_Not »

res0nat0r wrote: post #153
Can_Not wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No need to dig into the weeds or wax poetic on the term, people call it serverless because you, the user, don't have to manage any servers personally when you use the "serverless" application. It sounds like the dislike comes from folks here who just want to be contrary is all.

So by that definition, facebook, linode, shared webhosts, GCE, etc.. are serverless. AirBnB is homeless. Uber is automobileless.

Ok, maybe I'm not being contrarian, maybe I just like semantically useful and intuitive technical terms instead of blatantly wrong and misleading ones? Maybe the problem is that I care about my field of expertise and don't want it to be further watered down by the perpetual sloppiness of "who cares, it's just a name"?

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#155

Post by Can_Not »

edblarney wrote: post #152
Can_Not wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, linode, shared webhosts, and facebook are all serverless.

No. Nobody ever used a social network and had to manage servers to do it, or ever referred to servers, nor where they implied. Using a 'social network' has nothing to do with servers. Managing back end infrastructure is fundamentally a 'server oriented' paradigm. 'Electric cars' are a perfectly apt name to refer to cars that are not gas/cylinder engines, just as 'steel roofing' is perfectly apt to differentiate from…

> Nobody ever used a social network and had to manage servers to do it, or ever referred to servers, nor where they implied. > Using a 'social network' has nothing to do with servers.

So when I goto facebook, instead of a server, I connect to a ______?

> 'Electric cars' are a perfectly apt name to refer to cars that are not gas/cylinder engines, just as 'steel roofing' is perfectly apt to differentiate from the standard tar based products at least in consumer roofing (in cold climes).

Electric cars are called so for semantically useful and intuitive reasons: They are electric instead of gasoline. Steel roofing is called so for semantically useful and intuitive reasons: its a roof made from steel instead of tar. That seems incoherent as a defense to using them term "serverless" to refer to something that is literally a several buildings full of servers.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#156

Post by res0nat0r »

Can_Not wrote: post #154
res0nat0r wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to dig into the weeds or wax poetic on the term, people call it serverless because you, the user, don't have to manage any servers personally when you use the "serverless" application. It sounds like the dislike comes from folks here who just want to be contrary is all.

So by that definition, facebook, linode, shared webhosts, GCE, etc.. are serverless. AirBnB is homeless. Uber is automobileless. Ok, maybe I'm not being contrarian, maybe I just like semantically useful and intuitive technical terms instead of blatantly wrong and misleading ones? Maybe the problem is that I care about my field of expertise and don't want it to be further watered down by the perpetual sloppiness of "w…

I feel like I'm repeating myself, but serverless means you don't care about servers when running your code At all. That's it. Your examples above don't fit into that at all, so they aren't really applicable.

You submit your job, function, whatever and it...just runs. You don't have to worry about servers, hence the name. Not sure why everyone feels like arguing over a simple concept, but alas.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#157

Post by riobard »

marktangotango wrote: post #150
IanCal wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

hyper.sh containers are kernel-isolated like virtual machines.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#158

Post by Can_Not »

res0nat0r wrote: post #156
Can_Not wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by that definition, facebook, linode, shared webhosts, GCE, etc.. are serverless. AirBnB is homeless. Uber is automobileless. Ok, maybe I'm not being contrarian, maybe I just like semantically useful and intuitive technical terms instead of blatantly wrong and misleading ones? Maybe the problem is that I care about my field of expertise and don't want it to be further watered down by the perpetual sloppiness of "w…

I feel like I'm repeating myself, but serverless means you don't care about servers when running your code At all. That's it. Your examples above don't fit into that at all, so they aren't really applicable. You submit your job, function, whatever and it...just runs. You don't have to worry about servers, hence the name. Not sure why everyone feels like arguing over a simple concept, but alas.

> but serverless means you don't care about servers when running your code At all

We already have semantically useful terms/naming conventions for that. Shared Host, Cloud hosted, $LAYER-as-a-Service, etc.. No need to use a blatantly misleading term instead.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#159

Post by shawn-butler »

PetahNZ wrote: post #131
ralusek wrote: post #15

This is a screenshot of my google search from 2 days ago: http://i.imgur.com/BNAcSsn.png I've been using Lambda quite a bit, I think it's SO amazingly useful. Tasks that are highly parallelized and CPU intensive can literally be infinitely scaled out. I find it weird that their poster child use case is still always a reactive event like watching S3 and formatting images. There are so many use cases for directly invok…

Except for the fact Lambda is limited to 100 concurrent executions.

This isn't a fact. The default limit is 100 concurrent per region.

Also a simple conversation with AWS increases the limit[0].

They obviously don't want people to write absurd runaway structures and 100 is an arbitrarily chosen value to guard against that.

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#160

Post by kpil »

ec109685 wrote: post #111
kpil wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The cloud is just someone else's computer. It's a genuine business case, as running a lean and secure server farm is no child's play, but it's also oversold so much that my eyes hurts. Actual serverless computing would be implemented as p2p. Possibly interesting in a typical EvilCorpesque large corporation. Besides, Seti@home (Boinc) have been doing serverless computing for almost 20 years and it wasn't the…

P2P would be using peer computers as servers, so it wouldn't be serverless by your definition.

That would be computerless computing - seems to a harder problem to solve... P2P was about using non-dedicated computers. It's like the antithesis of the currently marked cloud solutions isn't it?
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