151–160 of 164 posts
I wish they hadn't named the units of computation "Lambda functions". Cause, you know there's already something known as a "Lambda function" in computer science. But kudos for Amazon for furthering the datacenter-is-the-computer approach. It is simply the right thing to do.
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It seems like you're seriously saying that people who are studying computer science lack the ability to tell the difference. Naming the product something that closely resembles its functionality seems like a great idea for a product. It's still Amazon Lambda, and I think it's very unlikely that people will simply refer to it as "Lambda." If CS students find themselves hopelessly confused by this product name, they ar…
I'm not arguing they will not be able to tell the difference... I'm arguing it will cause confusion at some point, and maybe that's a negative externality of naming this product "Lambda." Nobody said "lose a generation of CS students." And, as I've noticed in the past, searching for "y combinator" + any language name will often keep useful results away until you finally block this site. I'm not sure if this is still…
Is this comparable to IronWorker?
[I'm with Iron.io] Similar, yes. We're excited that developers are seeing the power of the task/worker/lambda being the scalable unit of work rather than server or VM or even container. Haven't used Lambda much yet but off hand we see many IronWorker advantages: - Supports all languages - Easily scale to thousands of parallel workers - Integrated logging, error reporting, alerts, auto-retries on failure - Integration…
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Most of the Python things I would want to do have slow startup times. Generally I keep my pythons running. But node is super quick to start.
That's an interesting perspective - what's a slow startup time in this context? A quick back-of-the-envelope test on my machine for both node and python suggest similar (around 100 ms) start up times for the bare environments. Do you just mean that you'd prefer to use node for smaller jobs anyway?
so maybe lambda its not suitable for things that are less than a few seconds.
I could write python with no django and try to structure things so they don't need database. but then I would have to take input from and put output data back to a queue of some sort.
>> A quick back-of-the-envelope test
and actually python on mine was even faster than node when both are doing nothing. so my assumption was wrong (but its based on mostly using django and all my node stuff is small servers and tools)
» time node noop.js node noop.js 0.04s user 0.01s system 98% cpu 0.045 total
» time python noop.py python noop.py 0.01s user 0.01s system 90% cpu 0.026 total
but importing significant numbers of libraries would be the real test.
the main benefits to lambda would still be:
- scaling for high demand - no cost for idle time
and let's not worry about the micro pennies in startup times
Huh? Shared server infrastructure? That's really what this sounds like. Welcome to web hosting in 1999 guys. Most of the point of AWS was that you have your own dedicated resources. Sure, this is a scaling solution, but revolutionary?
> Welcome to web hosting in 1999 guys. Sorry, where were you getting servers in 1999 that existed for fractions of a second?
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Really douche to use a computer science term as your product name, are they going to trade mark that or are the just happy with the confusion it will cause.
I have a hard time believing there is cause for confusion here, have Physicists been stumped by Amazon Redshift? I'm not being facetious, I just don't see how a product name that is niche to people using Amazon services is likely to confuse people. Also, CS hardly owns the greek letter lambda, it like many greek letters has been used for many products and features over the years. Delta is an airline, but they're doin…
As someone who does use AWS a lot and lambda functions, then yes, overloading the term is dumb. I'll also probably end up using Lambda functions.
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I won't be surprised if someone writes a generic lambda library which given a cloud provider generates relevant mappings/code. Will take care of some of the vendor lock-in concerns ?
I think this would be the solution. I guess lambda is basically IFTTT at scale with more configurable "T" portion. Anyway, libcloud seems to be leading the way in this kind of standardization, so that's good news. There's also providers that have drop in AWS-compatible APIs for some services. Then there is stuff like apache mesos for creating that infrastructure, which is less relevant to smaller companies. But I sus…
I’ve had a chance to use the service for a couple of weeks. My quick summary review is that it’s a little tricky setting up the IAM roles and security groups, but once you have that going, it works great! I see a ton of potential here in transforming the way people use AWS. I also put together the Netflix use cases in the keynote so if you have any questions I’ll try to answer them!