Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform • Hacker News Board

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#51

Post by sbov » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

kauju wrote: post #43

joecot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC? Are you pre-warming your lambda functions? Did you open up your RDS instance to the world so you could connect to it from a public lambda network? I know you had to pull some magic, because I've been down that road. It's been a problem for years and there's been no sign of a solution. Example article from last month: https://mediu…

Your right that the cold start times are not ideal. But you get a huge free request load per month. Put an uptime pinger on it and keep it warm. Or do what I do and write your functions in golang. My average cold start time is around 4 seconds. For the DB connection you put the lambda in the same vpc that the RDS exists in. Then you open the connection pool and reuse it if its active. Not that a new connection is a b…

I know uptime pingers are easy and obvious solutions (I use them myself), but everytime I have to resort to this sort of hack it reminds me of how immature serverless is.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#52

Post by marenkay » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #25

pmlnr wrote: post #22

The coming age of people with no understanding of what running code actually means, no idea how hardware/close to hardware systems behave deep down, is going to be fabulous, and full of wasted computing.

I disagree. If you build a good enough abstraction, you can give developers a lot for free without needing them to understand. Current serverless platforms are wasteful, but the underlying concept is not inherently wasteful, and I think that cloud providers and serverless software platforms will improve over time.

The need to understand is a primary skill for a decent engineer. Was in the 1960‘s and still is today. Lack of Knowledge is what makes an engineer a business risk.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#53

Post by SSilver2k2 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

Serverless is great, but I am really loving Zappa for Python Flask and Django development with Lambda and API Gateway.

Deployed our first production tool with it and it's been working great.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#54

Post by drchickensalad » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #49

_Marak_ wrote: post #13

Congratulations to Austen and Serverless Inc. for raising an additional 10m dollars. From what I've seen they are all very nice people over at Serverless. I've been running a small service similar to their new "Serverless Platform" for some time and was approached by them in 2014 to see about joining their team. Ultimately I ended up deciding not to join because I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineerin…

> I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineering presence in theit leadership to make a good product That seems like a strange requirement. Ultimately for a business to be successful there has to be people that know business, marketing, and slaes. If the leadership team is all hard-core tech engineers, there will be a lack of all of the other social and fundamental business skills needed.

Not the OP, but they only said it wasn't strong enough, not exclusively engineers. I see plenty of grey area here.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#55

Post by jchrisa » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

joecot wrote: post #36

brylie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may misunderstand your comment. That said, where I work (MaaS Global) we have a production PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS Relational Database Service (RDS): https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/ We connect to the AWS RDS instance in our lambda functions using an ES library called knex.js and some environment variables to store the DB credentials: https://knexjs.org/

How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC? Are you pre-warming your lambda functions? Did you open up your RDS instance to the world so you could connect to it from a public lambda network? I know you had to pull some magic, because I've been down that road. It's been a problem for years and there's been no sign of a solution. Example article from last month: https://mediu…

My employer offers FaunaDB with a pay-per-request pricing model. To bypass cold-start lambda issues, I code the app to talk directly to the database. For certain richer functions I might invoke a Lambda, but for basic crud operations the database access control does the trick. And no cold-start issue.

Here's the data model part of my todo app if you want to see queries in the app: https://github.com/fauna/todomvc-fauna-spa/blob/master/src/T...

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#56

Post by athenot » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

rantanplan wrote: post #44

yoran wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the example you give is more because there's a mismatch between technologies, rather than the "fault" of serverless. In serverless, your endpoints become infinitely scalable. This doesn't go well when they're backed by technologies where there is a hard limit on the number of connections, for instance SQL servers or a Redis server. I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverle…

> I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless Empty statement that means nothing. SQL/RDBMS is backed by computer science and robust engineering examples that make the world spin. Alternatives are usually full of fanfare and false promises. > I think AWS has already started that with Amazon Aurora. Just in time when we were talking about…

>> I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless

> Empty statement that means nothing. SQL/RDBMS is backed by computer science and robust engineering examples that make the world spin. Alternatives are usually full of fanfare and false promises.

Traditional relational databaases have indeed solved many issues that some newer datastores struggle with. But the flip side is that it is non-trivial to design traditional databases that are not Single Points Of Failure.

Storing data is surprizingly hard in a cloud environment, and involves trade-offs. Reaching a comprehensive solution (fast, HA, consistent, easily recoverable, scalable volum, evolvable schemas...) is hard no matter what technology you pick.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#57

Post by spamizbad » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #49

_Marak_ wrote: post #13

Congratulations to Austen and Serverless Inc. for raising an additional 10m dollars. From what I've seen they are all very nice people over at Serverless. I've been running a small service similar to their new "Serverless Platform" for some time and was approached by them in 2014 to see about joining their team. Ultimately I ended up deciding not to join because I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineerin…

> I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineering presence in theit leadership to make a good product That seems like a strange requirement. Ultimately for a business to be successful there has to be people that know business, marketing, and slaes. If the leadership team is all hard-core tech engineers, there will be a lack of all of the other social and fundamental business skills needed.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable given their domain. If you’re in a technology-frontiering business, of which serverless most certainly qualifies for, you need management that’s going to support engineering through the litany of challenges they will face. I’ve seen founders get cold feet and cut corners or pivot away from things when the engineering side seems daunting.

The other side here is your customers are likely engineers themselves. You need to build products that connect with them and genuinely make their lives easier... if your leadership is too far removed from that you’ll end up with a product platform shapes via a game telephone...

With that said, some strong hires early on can make a real difference here.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#58

Post by cmjqol » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

jchrisa wrote: post #55

joecot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC? Are you pre-warming your lambda functions? Did you open up your RDS instance to the world so you could connect to it from a public lambda network? I know you had to pull some magic, because I've been down that road. It's been a problem for years and there's been no sign of a solution. Example article from last month: https://mediu…

My employer offers FaunaDB with a pay-per-request pricing model. To bypass cold-start lambda issues, I code the app to talk directly to the database. For certain richer functions I might invoke a Lambda, but for basic crud operations the database access control does the trick. And no cold-start issue. Here's the data model part of my todo app if you want to see queries in the app: https://github.com/fauna/todomvc-fau…

> My employer offers FaunaDB with a pay-per-request pricing model.

Tried FaunaDB few month ago the latency was beyond 200ms for a simple a read , and beyond 600ms for an insert.

Would not recommend it at this point.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#59

Post by inspector14 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

SSilver2k2 wrote: post #53

Serverless is great, but I am really loving Zappa for Python Flask and Django development with Lambda and API Gateway. Deployed our first production tool with it and it's been working great.

do you have any strong opinions re: differences between chalice / zappa?

I was looking at these two recently and ended up going with chalice as the docs seemed a bit simpler and more readily accessible.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#60

Post by joecot » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

kauju wrote: post #43

joecot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC? Are you pre-warming your lambda functions? Did you open up your RDS instance to the world so you could connect to it from a public lambda network? I know you had to pull some magic, because I've been down that road. It's been a problem for years and there's been no sign of a solution. Example article from last month: https://mediu…

Your right that the cold start times are not ideal. But you get a huge free request load per month. Put an uptime pinger on it and keep it warm. Or do what I do and write your functions in golang. My average cold start time is around 4 seconds. For the DB connection you put the lambda in the same vpc that the RDS exists in. Then you open the connection pool and reuse it if its active. Not that a new connection is a b…

Here's the problem. Uptime pingers work great if you have a low volume service. You keep 1, 2, or maybe 3 instances of the function warm, and you don't have to deal with cold start times. But there's 2 places that idea falls seriously flat.

1. This doesn't work if you were actually trying to build your API as microservices. You might have 60+ functions, some which call each other, and keeping them all warm is not really a good option.

2. Keeping a minimum number of instances warm fails to account for half the point of using serverless architectures: being able to scale. Sure, if you have little to no traffic, you can keep a couple instances warm and be up, but if your app needs to scale to 5 or 10 or more instances to handle bursts of traffic, the surfers who hit that cold start end up dealing with an extremely bad experience.

More importantly, as Lambda gets more popular, uptime pingers get less and less useful because of tragedy of the commons. The reason for needing cold starts at all is that AWS is rotating out instances to be able to keep up with overall demand with limited resourcs. If only a few people are sending heartbeats to their instances, their instances stay in rotation because other people's get rotated out instead. If everyone is sending heartbeat requests, some of them will still end up getting rotated out, and therefore everyone will need to increase the frequency of the heartbeat requests to keep their functions warm. It's not a sustainable solution, and I'm baffled that AWS tacitly promotes it as a resolution to the problem they themselves have caused.

It's been years. AWS needs to fix Lambda VPC cold starts.