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Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#201

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

deanCommie wrote: post #116
sokoloff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DynamoDB is as serverless as Lambda. (There are servers somewhere for both, but in neither case do you operate them.)

I'll give you there are no hosts to manage, but Lambda is serverless in the sense of "stateless" and "ephemeral". DynamoDB is still persistent storage. It seems that every every "hosted" solution is now being dubbed "serverless". :\ Oh and of course 5+ if-statements is now "AI".

Having no hosts to manage is the defining feature of serverless.

When you create a DB with DynamoDB, you're just telling AWS "I need a database" and it gives you one. No need to worry about deciding how much CPU power, RAM, or storage you'll need for it.

> It seems that every every "hosted" solution is now being dubbed "serverless". :\

Got a good example of something being called "serverless" that you don't think should be? I mean, yes, DynamoDB, Lambda, etc. are all running on servers. But the idea is that you don't manage them. No packages to keep up to date. No worrying about whether or not the instance size you chose is big enough. No dealing with autoscaling to meet demand when a million reddit users hit your app.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#203

Post by deanCommie »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #201
deanCommie wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you there are no hosts to manage, but Lambda is serverless in the sense of "stateless" and "ephemeral". DynamoDB is still persistent storage. It seems that every every "hosted" solution is now being dubbed "serverless". :\ Oh and of course 5+ if-statements is now "AI".

Having no hosts to manage is the defining feature of serverless. When you create a DB with DynamoDB, you're just telling AWS "I need a database" and it gives you one. No need to worry about deciding how much CPU power, RAM, or storage you'll need for it. > It seems that every every "hosted" solution is now being dubbed "serverless". :\ Got a good example of something being called "serverless" that you don't think sho…

DynamoDB, Aurora, Kinesis, etc all existed BEFORE Lambda, and noone called them "serverless" until Lambda and now everything is called that.

Meanwhile Kinesis requires you to specify the number of shards you have to use, so there is management even if they're not called "servers".

> No need to worry about deciding how much CPU power, RAM, or storage you'll need for it.

You realize you specify the RAM for lambda functions, which correlates to CPU.

And with Dynamo you specify RCUs and WCUs and you enable autoscaling which adds more...

I'm not trying to be pedantic about "The cloud being just someone else's servers". I mean that "serverless" to mean is a very explicit thing about Lambda and writing stateless code. And every existing hosted multi-tenant service shouldn't just be dubbed that.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#204

Post by avidal »

reconbot wrote: post #189
vincentmarle wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Are you using AppSync?

Nope, appsync came out a long time after we were in production and while it's very powerful, it's would require a full rewrite of our application. It's an application service/framework upon itself. The Bustle stack looks like Redis/Elasticsearch => NodeJS Lambda GraphQL API layer => (sometimes api gateway) => NodeJS lambda render layer => api gateway => CDN. We're working towards removing all the api gateway usage if…

I'm curious on what's missing from Cloudflare Workers to allow you to remove the API Gateway usage. We're actively looking for more advanced use cases so we can make sure we prioritize upcoming features. Reply here or send me an email at at cloudflare.com.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#205

Post by Lord_Zero »

juoemeka wrote: post #118
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #30

My uptime monitoring project uses AWS Lambda heavily, almost exclusively https://apex.sh/ping/ — it has been great. I've processed 3,687,727,585 "checks" (requests really) with it, and I only had roughly 1 hour of downtime two years ago in a single region. Since then it has been stable. I have 14 or so regions so doing the same thing with EC2 would have considerable overhead, though I can still imagine many cases whe…

How much does it cost you monthly?

Since he's charging the customer I doubt he will give that information up.

https://apex.sh/ping/#pricing

But the business idea is simple so I am sure it would be easy to calculate a rough idea.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#206

Post by kondro »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #31
awinder wrote: post #5

Cloudwatch logs have been a big game changer versus on-disk logs for us. Getting into larger clusters (and larger log files), figuring out what’s happening in log files became somewhat arduous. https://github.com/jorgebastida/awslogs for viewing / tailing / searching is a lot easier. It’s also fairly straightforward to get logs streamed through to ELK hosted within AWS, if you’re interested in that angle.

Do you guys find CloudWatch logs too slow? Even on very small apps I find searching the past few days takes minutes (5-10m), but I'm using "structured" JSON logs as well.

CloudWatch is definitely a write optimised product. Any kind of reading or searching is pretty terrible.

I’m sure AWS would recommend you use Kinesis Firehose or something to put in ElasticSearch and use Kibana or something. But I would be great to have an equally scalable log parser/searcher.

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