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Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

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Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#51

Post by chx »

hobls wrote: post #44
chx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then even above that, you should be running your own instances in a colo space Why are people jumping from EC2 to colo and skipping dedicated servers? Mystery of my life. We were running the 75th largest site in the US some years ago (as measured by Quantcast), ran the numbers and colo was ridiculously expensive and way more troublesome.

Oh, I was defining "EC2" as everything from small shared virtual boxes to EC2 bare metal. I suppose on-site dedicated servers is definitely a point I left out of my hypothetical list though! I used to work at an unnamed company that had a server rack plugged in between the kitchen and the ping pong table. Though I never witnessed such a thing, I'd be shocked if there was never an outage due to a particularly enthusia…

Not on site, no, renting them from some big provider. The advantages are huge: if the magic smoke gets released getting a replacement on line is Someone Else's (TM) problem. If you find you need to grow, you release the one you rented into the pool and the provider will be able to rent it to the next schmuck. EC2 bare metal is very expensive. In general, I am very cloud skeptic. I found the bare metal being a much better price/value for almost all websites. People are writing these complex apps that scale across database clusters and I am like... YAGNI. One database server (or a two for a hot spare) and maybe separate few web frontends is almost always enough.

Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#52

Post by eximius »

Is it just me, or does anyone else find the documentation of AWS and related services nearly incomprehensible? Maybe it's just too 'enterprise-y' and I haven't spent enough time in that environment, but it feels like all the information is squirreled away in 10,000 different pages and that I'd have to read all of it to just get the basics.

Also, does anyone know if there is an API for AWS to dynamically create, load, and launch EC2 and/or Lambda instances (i.e., boto - though I'm open to suggestions for something else) AND, preferably, have separate billing for each thing? Do I need multiple accounts to do separate billing? Something about IAM roles...?

Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#53

Post by lucb1e »

This headline is weird. I thought it was going to be about doing computations client side since it says "serverless", but what they mean is "without a dedicated instance running all the time" (about halfway through the article, I figured out what "lambdas" are in this context).

So if there goes so much effort into calculating costs for PBKDF2 on servers (ahem, "serverless"), why not move it to the client side? I like client side hashing a lot because it transparently shows what security you apply, and any passive or after-the-fact attacks (think 1024 bit encryption decryption which will slowly move from 'impossible for small governments' to 'just very slow' soon) are instantly mitigated. The server should still apply a single round of their favorite hash function (like SHA-2) with a secret value, so an attacker will not be able to log in with stolen database credentials.

But that's probably too cheap and transparent when you can also do it with a Lambda™.

Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#54

Post by deklerk »

eximius wrote: post #52

Is it just me, or does anyone else find the documentation of AWS and related services nearly incomprehensible? Maybe it's just too 'enterprise-y' and I haven't spent enough time in that environment, but it feels like all the information is squirreled away in 10,000 different pages and that I'd have to read all of it to just get the basics. Also, does anyone know if there is an API for AWS to dynamically create, load,…

YES. Absolutely yes. I _hated_ this aspect of working with AWS. Also, documentation always came off as "generic" and "wordy" without being "useful" - a huge, huge article that might have the tiny sliver you need in it, or perhaps one of its dozens of sister articles would have the answer, who knows.

Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#55

Post by kentonv »

lucb1e wrote: post #53

This headline is weird. I thought it was going to be about doing computations client side since it says "serverless", but what they mean is "without a dedicated instance running all the time" (about halfway through the article, I figured out what "lambdas" are in this context). So if there goes so much effort into calculating costs for PBKDF2 on servers (ahem, "serverless"), why not move it to the client side? I like…

"Serverless" is a recent industry buzzword which roughly means: "Server hosting environment where you upload code representing some sort of event handler and let the host decide where and when to run it. You are billed per event rather than per server instance."

This article is comparing the raw CPU power provided by two different serverless products. PBKDF2 is used only as an example of a computation requiring a lot of CPU.

Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#56

Post by lainga »

deklerk wrote: post #54
eximius wrote: post #52

Is it just me, or does anyone else find the documentation of AWS and related services nearly incomprehensible? Maybe it's just too 'enterprise-y' and I haven't spent enough time in that environment, but it feels like all the information is squirreled away in 10,000 different pages and that I'd have to read all of it to just get the basics. Also, does anyone know if there is an API for AWS to dynamically create, load,…

YES. Absolutely yes. I _hated_ this aspect of working with AWS. Also, documentation always came off as "generic" and "wordy" without being "useful" - a huge, huge article that might have the tiny sliver you need in it, or perhaps one of its dozens of sister articles would have the answer, who knows.

You're only supposed to grab the tiny sliver so you can mention it to $consultant in desperation.

Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#57

Post by hobls »

chx wrote: post #51
hobls wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I was defining "EC2" as everything from small shared virtual boxes to EC2 bare metal. I suppose on-site dedicated servers is definitely a point I left out of my hypothetical list though! I used to work at an unnamed company that had a server rack plugged in between the kitchen and the ping pong table. Though I never witnessed such a thing, I'd be shocked if there was never an outage due to a particularly enthusia…

Not on site, no, renting them from some big provider. The advantages are huge: if the magic smoke gets released getting a replacement on line is Someone Else's (TM) problem. If you find you need to grow, you release the one you rented into the pool and the provider will be able to rent it to the next schmuck. EC2 bare metal is very expensive. In general, I am very cloud skeptic. I found the bare metal being a much be…

I’m sure that makes plenty of sense for many applications! I’m very fond of some of the benefits of cloud infrastructure, but I’m sure you’ve heard the pitch.

Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#58

Post by lucb1e »

kentonv wrote: post #55
lucb1e wrote: post #53

This headline is weird. I thought it was going to be about doing computations client side since it says "serverless", but what they mean is "without a dedicated instance running all the time" (about halfway through the article, I figured out what "lambdas" are in this context). So if there goes so much effort into calculating costs for PBKDF2 on servers (ahem, "serverless"), why not move it to the client side? I like…

"Serverless" is a recent industry buzzword which roughly means: "Server hosting environment where you upload code representing some sort of event handler and let the host decide where and when to run it. You are billed per event rather than per server instance." This article is comparing the raw CPU power provided by two different serverless products. PBKDF2 is used only as an example of a computation requiring a lot…

> PBKDF2 is used only as an example of a computation requiring a lot of CPU.

Oh wow, I completely missed the point here. Having worked on strong client-side hashing in browsers and being into crypto generally, I saw this problem being presented and completely mistook it. Thanks!

Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#59

Post by PretzelFisch »

eximius wrote: post #52

Is it just me, or does anyone else find the documentation of AWS and related services nearly incomprehensible? Maybe it's just too 'enterprise-y' and I haven't spent enough time in that environment, but it feels like all the information is squirreled away in 10,000 different pages and that I'd have to read all of it to just get the basics. Also, does anyone know if there is an API for AWS to dynamically create, load,…

I find the documentation good and some frustratingly vague depending on the service. In AWS everything can be done via code including starting and launching EC2/lambda. You'll need to look in their sdk documentation and experiment a little to figure out what everything means and in what order you need to make the api requests.

Re: Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

#60

Post by com2kid »

doczoidberg wrote: post #50
com2kid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent, though 200ms seems like a long time for a service to respond to something, especially after being warmed up. I'm only so-so happy about GCF's response time. I honestly wonder why these cloud functions take so long to execute after being warmed up.

hmm firebase (google) cloud functions take 2,3s in average for me for a respond (simple json output out of firebase)

My stupid JSON returning functions average out to around 50ms - 250ms.

I'm querying across a couple hundred rows. I'm reasonably certain that calling out to Perl and a regex would be faster for so little data. :/

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