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Serverless Map/Reduce

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Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#51

Post by CaptSpify »

luhn wrote: post #13
CaptSpify wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you abstract something away doesn't mean it no longer exists. I don't manually manage cache on my laptop's HD, but that doesn't mean it's "cacheless".

I'm not saying "serverless" is a good term, I'm saying that it's the term. It's won. You can argue all you want that it's a terribly misleading/incorrect term, but people aren't going to stop using it. So let's move on.

I'm not convinced it's won. Especially since there's still tons of blog posts arguing over the definition

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#52

Post by badminton1 »

I do not agree with term serverless. Amazon Lambda is a service, therefore there is a server involved.

It's like saying deathless meat, because someone else killed the animal you are consuming.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#53

Post by jedberg »

stcredzero wrote: post #31
jedberg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was exactly the demo they gave and their AWS Dev Day in SF in July. Using Lambda and the IOT gateway to run a massively multiplayer game (they had everyone in the room play from the web via their phone).

But was that just a demo, or are they going to make a product out of that?

I mean it was a demo of a product they created using Lambda and the IOT framework. It was a working game, it just wasn't very fun. :)

The code was on GitHub but I can't seem to find it.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#54

Post by jedberg »

chrisseaton wrote: post #36
jedberg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That used to be a hard technological limitation but they fixed it a few months back. You should be able to get more now (but you have to have a good justification for it).

100 seems an odd number to be a technological limitation, doesn't it? It's not a power of two or anything so it's not the size of an integer. How could technology have been limiting it?

Technology in the sense that it was a hard coded variable, but it was picked arbitrarily.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#55

Post by etrain »

nostrademons wrote: post #44
etrain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the nice things about lambda is the billing is super granular - you get billed at 100ms intervals. Assuming 70 hours at $0.000000834/100ms [1] The whole job costs $2.10. [1] - https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

By comparison (since I was curious), 70 hours on an m3.medium spot instance will run around $0.70. On an on-demand, it's about $5.39. EMR will cost you about $7.00 on top of the EC2 costs. If you can peg the CPU and don't mind getting interrupted, spot instances are still a fair bit cheaper. But Lambda looks pretty attractive for any other use-case where the statelessness of Lambda doesn't bite you.

Keep in mind that with EC2 you're billed hourly so the fastest a 70 cpu-hour job could finish on m3.medium for $0.70 is 1 hour, and that's ignoring setup time, etc.

Meanwhile, on Lambda, you can actually run 1600 60s jobs (or 27 CPU-hours) in 3 minutes. This is inclusive of setup time, job submission, stragglers, etc. [1]

Of course, if you've got sustained load, it's cheaper to go with spot instances, but the "occasionally I need a buttload of compute," model is well-served by Lambda.

[1] http://ericjonas.com/pywren.html

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#56

Post by [deleted] »

badminton1 wrote: post #52

I do not agree with term serverless. Amazon Lambda is a service, therefore there is a server involved. It's like saying deathless meat, because someone else killed the animal you are consuming.

[deleted]

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#57

Post by kpil »

badminton1 wrote: post #52

I do not agree with term serverless. Amazon Lambda is a service, therefore there is a server involved. It's like saying deathless meat, because someone else killed the animal you are consuming.

Exactly. The cloud is just someone else's computer.

It's a genuine business case, as running a lean and secure server farm is no child's play, but it's also oversold so much that my eyes hurts.

Actual serverless computing would be implemented as p2p. Possibly interesting in a typical EvilCorpesque large corporation.

Besides, Seti@home (Boinc) have been doing serverless computing for almost 20 years and it wasn't the first implementations.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#58

Post by z3t4 »

stcredzero wrote: post #18

I wonder if something like AWS Lambda could be applied to multiplayer games? It seems like game-loop based games would be a good domain for such a programming model. The entire game could be expressed as a function that turns tick N into tick N+1. Such a function would be composed of many other functions, of course. So for example, there would also be a function that took as an argument the player at time N and gave…

What is the latency overhead in AWS Lambda ?

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#59

Post by inopinatus »

kpil wrote: post #57
badminton1 wrote: post #52

I do not agree with term serverless. Amazon Lambda is a service, therefore there is a server involved. It's like saying deathless meat, because someone else killed the animal you are consuming.

Exactly. The cloud is just someone else's computer. It's a genuine business case, as running a lean and secure server farm is no child's play, but it's also oversold so much that my eyes hurts. Actual serverless computing would be implemented as p2p. Possibly interesting in a typical EvilCorpesque large corporation. Besides, Seti@home (Boinc) have been doing serverless computing for almost 20 years and it wasn't the…

Achieving real-world service objectives via cloud infrastructure requires a different approach to architecture, data management, process design, service ownership, availability, cost management, the list goes on.

Some uses of cloud services are superficially comparable to old-school bureau computing. But to say it is "just someone else's computer" is trite, grossly misleading and downright bad advice, because treating it as such will get you burned.

Re: Serverless Map/Reduce

#60

Post by detaro »

kuschku wrote: post #29
luhn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying "serverless" is a good term, I'm saying that it's the term. It's won. You can argue all you want that it's a terribly misleading/incorrect term, but people aren't going to stop using it. So let's move on.

> It's won. That’s the linguistic descriptivist position. We can also require all papers and journals and conferences to use "Function as a Service" everywhere, and force all professors to teach "Function as a Service", and require all official publications to use "Function as a Service", by defining an authoritative dictionary, which gets its authority by law. Then wait a few months, and the term "serverless" will b…

Having a unified way of how to spell things is quite different then prescribing what to call specific things. Which luckily outside of very limited areas (legal terms, protected names and trademarks) doesn't exist in your example countries either.
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