Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 207 posts

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

#41

I can't name any names for obvious reasons or give you more hints about what industry this company is in but I just did DD on a very impressive outfit that ran their entire company on Google's cloud platform, it held about 500T of data and held up amazingly well under load. I was super impressed with how they had set this all up and they were extremely well aware of all the limitations and do's and dont's of that par…

DD?

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

#42

I can't name any names for obvious reasons or give you more hints about what industry this company is in but I just did DD on a very impressive outfit that ran their entire company on Google's cloud platform, it held about 500T of data and held up amazingly well under load. I was super impressed with how they had set this all up and they were extremely well aware of all the limitations and do's and dont's of that par…

DD?

Due diligence.

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

#43

I can't name any names for obvious reasons or give you more hints about what industry this company is in but I just did DD on a very impressive outfit that ran their entire company on Google's cloud platform, it held about 500T of data and held up amazingly well under load. I was super impressed with how they had set this all up and they were extremely well aware of all the limitations and do's and dont's of that par…

DD?

Due diligence?

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

#44

I can't name any names for obvious reasons or give you more hints about what industry this company is in but I just did DD on a very impressive outfit that ran their entire company on Google's cloud platform, it held about 500T of data and held up amazingly well under load. I was super impressed with how they had set this all up and they were extremely well aware of all the limitations and do's and dont's of that par…

DD?

My guess is “Due diligence”

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

#45
I did a project using the first version of Azure Functions. It was early days with growing pains. I'll probably use Lambda on my next project. My general take is that serverless is a black box just like any computer - you need to figure out the rules of that black box and then accept those rules or tell the people who can open the box to fix something if it's broke.

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

#46

I have spent the last year and a half building a completely serverless production service on Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB (along with the standard auxiliary services like CW, SNS, Route53, S3, CF, X-Ray, etc.). It was a lot of work establishing new patterns for many of the operational aspects, particularly custom CW metrics and A/B deployments with Lambda traffic shifting, but in the end everything is set up nic…

Does Lambda have a good version control or CI workflow? My biggest question is how to develop severless functions with a team of developers.

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

#47
post #46

I have spent the last year and a half building a completely serverless production service on Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB (along with the standard auxiliary services like CW, SNS, Route53, S3, CF, X-Ray, etc.). It was a lot of work establishing new patterns for many of the operational aspects, particularly custom CW metrics and A/B deployments with Lambda traffic shifting, but in the end everything is set up nic…

Does Lambda have a good version control or CI workflow? My biggest question is how to develop severless functions with a team of developers.

You can utilize lambda traffic shifting in conjunction with CodeDeploy and Code Pipelines to do safe A/B (aka Blue/Green) deployments. It has some rough edges but overall works well. Check out these docs to get started: https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-application-model/blob...

It's also possible to use API Gateway canary deployments and dedicated "preprod" stages as well - the benefit being you can, in theory, use traffic shifting lifecycle hooks to deploy a new version completely isolated from customer traffic and test it before incrementally rolling out your main A/B deployment. I created an experimental proof-of-concept for this but haven't had the time to flesh it out for production usage, but would very much like to at some point.

tl;dr The answer to your question is yes, there is a good story around CI with Lambda using the AWS ecosystem. However Lambda alone is not something that should be relied on for long-term or definitive versioning on its own.

Edit: thinking about your question more, it seems you are assuming that individual developers will directly edit Lambda function code in the console and you want to track versions or trigger deployments based on that activity. You absolutely should not ever be editing Lambda code manually directly in the console outside of one-off experiments/prototypes that are completely unrelated to dev/test/production. Always keep your Lambda function code under source control and deploy using zips uploaded to S3 and CloudFormation (the serverless framework[1] provides good tooling for this, though we don't use it - instead we use SAM and our own internal tools).

[1] https://serverless.com/

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

#48
Just the opposite of serious for me.

Example: there's a website for all the weather radar stations in Canada that lets you see the last two hours of 10-minute radar snapshots. I wanted a dump of them to try some ML algorithms, but even after requests and emails there simply wasn't one.

So I set up a lambda to run every hour, load the website for all 31 weather stations and save all 6 images from the last hour to S3.

It took me an hour to setup. I've never gotten around to making that ML project, but lambda has kept on chugging away for me, GBs of data saved away. The only real cost is the s3 storage, still under $2/month.

Serverless is brilliant for little things like that.

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

#49
Yes I have— Cloud Custodian (https://github.com/capitalone/cloud-custodian) relies heavily on its event driven serverless policies to enable compliance across a large AWS fleet— filling in the gaps that are otherwise missing in IAM. Currently there are in the order of magnitude of 1000s of lambdas deployed across 100s of accounts and it definitely does exactly what it needs to do with little maintenance. Monitoring is done with a combination of cloudwatch, datadog and pagerduty so getting alerted on failing or errored invocations is completely built into our workflow.
Post reply on HN