21–30 of 93 posts
If you're wanting 'serverless' compute these days you'd probably deploy to something like Cloud Run – containers being the ultimate hedge against vendor lock-in.
This isn't true. Linux is the security sandbox. Multitenacy is safe using a user for each site.
>Like CGI, PHP was never multi-tenant safe.
This is isn't a problem with PHP. The following story about the author's site on a shared host getting hacked was a problem of shared hosts not caring about security.
We use AWS Lambda as a monolithic "serverless" to run our Django stack since Lambda can now take standard containers[0]. The full environment, costs us US$100/mnth to run production b2b application. Traffic is quite light, but we literally don't pay for non-usage. The most expensive thing of our monthly bill is the postgres RDS+Elasticache. So for our use case it is extremely cost effective, esp for UAT, Staging wher…
What does your cold start time look like with containers? I was contemplating deploying a similar stack for very occasional internal use: django + postgres rds (no need for cache). Had some horror stories with Java where the startup time was brutal, so they ended "pre-warming" lambdas. In the end, the whole ordeal cost more than an EC2 running 24/7. This was several years ago, so I'm curious whether things have impro…
We use 3 minute crons to keep a set of concurrent workers alive (pre-warming as you describe). The number of requests that hit full cold start are But yeah, not all frameworks can be cold-started in Lambda well. Rails can work. We built our Rails app before lambda could take containers and the coupling was too tight w/ slow libraries to move it into Lambda w/ any reasonable start time, like 20-30s. Just too expensive to decouple and get it into lambda, wasn't worth whatever CPU savings we would gain.
>and then invoked the CGI program directly. There was no security sandbox, and CGI was definitely not safe for multi-tenancy This isn't true. Linux is the security sandbox. Multitenacy is safe using a user for each site. >Like CGI, PHP was never multi-tenant safe. This is isn't a problem with PHP. The following story about the author's site on a shared host getting hacked was a problem of shared hosts not caring abou…
"We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all." -Rasmus Lerdorf
"I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code." -Rasmus Lerdorf
"I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers." -Rasmus Lerdorf
"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests." -Rasmus Lerdorf
"I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way." -Rasmus Lerdorf
"For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)" -Rasmus Lerdorf
"PHP is just a hammer. Nobody has ever gotten rich making hammers." -Rasmus Lerdorf
Ian Baker's PHP Hammer:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/
PHP: a fractal of bad design:
https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
>I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.
>You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.
>You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.
>You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.
>And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.
>Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.
>That’s what’s wrong with PHP.
Google App Engine came out in 2008, several years before AWS Lambda. I'd also argue the developer experience (especially for its time) was pretty fantastic. If you're wanting 'serverless' compute these days you'd probably deploy to something like Cloud Run – containers being the ultimate hedge against vendor lock-in.
This sales pitch ignores cloudflare workers, which sound pretty similar to me, with both webassembly and key-value storage. The distinguishing part of the articles option seems to be that webassembly functions are uploaded in an OCI container, which I don't think anyone else supports, and I don't think was designed with this use case in mind?
We use AWS Lambda as a monolithic "serverless" to run our Django stack since Lambda can now take standard containers[0]. The full environment, costs us US$100/mnth to run production b2b application. Traffic is quite light, but we literally don't pay for non-usage. The most expensive thing of our monthly bill is the postgres RDS+Elasticache. So for our use case it is extremely cost effective, esp for UAT, Staging wher…
But cold start time. This article claims their cold start time is only one or two milliseconds. Lambda's cold start time is orders of magnitude slower.
If you have a 100 function chain w/ 100ms cold start times in between, then that's a nightmare, but for us, we're monolothic so all our cold starts are bundled together. In the end I can't truly benefit from the 1-2ms. I suspect so many teams are in the same boat. But I do lose a lot w/o the debugging and ease of testing that come with monolithic applications.