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Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

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Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just worries me all the more. You basically get software engineers that wall themselves into their garden. It's like nodejs all over again...

I think this type of thing will end up being useful for special cases, but in general we'll still want to run our own servers. Their use case of creating a public API is a great one: it's a simple interface and having Lambda handle the auto-scaling is pretty awesome.

We are using Lambda to export CloudWatch metrics to another system. Haven't exceeded the free tier of Lambda yet, and CW itself was only $5 last month.

Having a t2 up the whole time would have been way more, plus it would have been subject to our Chaos Monkey.

Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just worries me all the more. You basically get software engineers that wall themselves into their garden. It's like nodejs all over again...

That's been the trend in the software industry since about 2000. When I started then, the job description was just "software engineer", and you were expected to know networking, databases, low-level code, UI code, scripting, etc. Now you have "frontend software engineer", "backend software engineer", "full-stack software engineer" (which seems to mean web framework + database, which is a very different meaning from w…

We're still figuring out how to separate responsibilities for building software... it's the same cycle of maturation that construction, manufacturing, and every other large domain goes through.

Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the appeal of Lambda is that most services get zero-to-low usage, and so something which is "pay only for usage" may be a net win over dedicated computing resources if you use it for the right parts. I've had a number of startup ideas that went nowhere, and it would've been handy to test & demo them without springing for the full $17/month for an EC2 t2.micro instance. Usually they have some key aspect that's…

Really $17 for a micro? Baby gce machine is $4.

    google micro (1 cpu, 0.6GB ram): $0.006/hr
    amazon nano  (1 cpu, 0.5GB ram): $0.0065/hour
    
    https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing
    https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
    in both cases, +disk, +traffic
Not exactly a crippling difference.

Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

#55
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really $17 for a micro? Baby gce machine is $4.

google micro (1 cpu, 0.6GB ram): $0.006/hr amazon nano (1 cpu, 0.5GB ram): $0.0065/hour https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ in both cases, +disk, +traffic Not exactly a crippling difference.

Except google gives you a discount just for using the instance. Amazon requires prepayment

Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

#56

Question: With these "Serverless" frameworks (Zappa, Chalice, Serverless, etc), do you have to redeploy to Lambda every time you want to test your changes during development? Is there a way to develop locally and get quick feedback?

I am not sure about the frameworks, but a lambda function is just that, a function. You can easily run your function and pass in an event object (a dict in Python) to test various scenarios. You don't need to deploy to test. Once you are ready you can deploy to lambda without publishing to fully test before publishing live.

Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

#57
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really $17 for a micro? Baby gce machine is $4.

google micro (1 cpu, 0.6GB ram): $0.006/hr amazon nano (1 cpu, 0.5GB ram): $0.0065/hour https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ in both cases, +disk, +traffic Not exactly a crippling difference.

Oh interesting...are nano instances new? Didn't see them last time I was looking for a "just throw up a demo" machine.

Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

#58

Question: With these "Serverless" frameworks (Zappa, Chalice, Serverless, etc), do you have to redeploy to Lambda every time you want to test your changes during development? Is there a way to develop locally and get quick feedback?

I am not sure about the frameworks, but a lambda function is just that, a function. You can easily run your function and pass in an event object (a dict in Python) to test various scenarios. You don't need to deploy to test. Once you are ready you can deploy to lambda without publishing to fully test before publishing live.

Thank you. Are these not meant to render user interfaces and just be for API-style computing?

Re: Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

#59
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google micro (1 cpu, 0.6GB ram): $0.006/hr amazon nano (1 cpu, 0.5GB ram): $0.0065/hour https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ in both cases, +disk, +traffic Not exactly a crippling difference.

Except google gives you a discount just for using the instance. Amazon requires prepayment

Swings and roundabouts. AWS gets flak for having expensive data transfer costs; Google's data transfer costs are even higher (both listed at same links above).

My point is that when you compare apples to apples, it's really not all that different.

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