Live data from Hacker News

Serverless Docker Beta

zeit.co

51–60 of 236 posts

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#51
post #30
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you connect to your database over TLS (maybe with an extra client certificate or something), I don't see much of a problem.

As far as protocol is concerned, if you're using TLS, a client certificate, and a strong password, sure, opening your database servers to world accessible should be fine. The problem is that it's possible, and very likely, there are exploits in the wild for your database server -- that are known but you failed to update for a day, or are 0 day exploits -- which are exploitable without having an authenticated account.…

You may be interested to know that Heroku exposes all PostgreSQL databases publically, and unless you are an enterprise customer there is no way to turn that ‘feature’ off:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/connecting-to-heroku-p...

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#52

Yep. Pretty soon. You write code. You create a docker file. You find a place to run the docker file with your code [cheapest!]. Run it through your tests. Monitor it. The end. No vpcs,salts, puppets, sshs,chefs, horses,anisbles, cats,ec2s,devops,noops, sysadmins, kubernetes or chaos monkeys required.

Those things are still required. You're just paying for the abstraction and hoping your host is competent enough to keep things running smoothly.

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#53
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a "serverless hater", but every company I've ever worked with had backend processes that were not tied to HTTP requests. I still keep actual servers around because the HTTP gateway is not the pain point. It's long-running processes, message systems, stream processing, and reporting. That said, I look forward to the company (or side project) where "serverless" can save me from also assuming the "devops" role.

Hello, I'm building a serverless platform. Could you please expand your "It's long-running processes, message systems, stream processing, and reporting" bit?

Not parent, but I have the same question; I worked in adtech and video analytics before, now with social media. It's usually a mix of some REST APIs, which already are very easy to scale and manage without using serverless, with long-running backend processes, such as:

* video encoding;

* ETL processes;

* other analytical workloads;

* long-running websocket connections with Twitter/Facebook/etc APIs.

From my perspective, serverless solves the "boring" part of making REST APIs easier to manage, which were already very easy to manage.

How would serverless be applies to, say, a python script that streams Twitter tweets using websockets?

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#54

Yep. Pretty soon. You write code. You create a docker file. You find a place to run the docker file with your code [cheapest!]. Run it through your tests. Monitor it. The end. No vpcs,salts, puppets, sshs,chefs, horses,anisbles, cats,ec2s,devops,noops, sysadmins, kubernetes or chaos monkeys required.

dokku is pretty close to this.

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#55

Yep. Pretty soon. You write code. You create a docker file. You find a place to run the docker file with your code [cheapest!]. Run it through your tests. Monitor it. The end. No vpcs,salts, puppets, sshs,chefs, horses,anisbles, cats,ec2s,devops,noops, sysadmins, kubernetes or chaos monkeys required.

[deleted]

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#56
post #12
post #6

Looks great for basic websites but it's missing the biggest and most difficult piece of cloud infrastructure. The DATABASE! Today you'd have to open up your cloud DB provider to the world since Zeit can't provide a list of IPs to whitelist. This is a showstopper for me unfortunately.

Most databases are quite unfit for the serverless world that's becoming a reality, where the needs shift towards global replication, flexible horizontal scalability (sharding) and vertical (provisioned QPS). We like and use CosmosDB because it fits this criteria. We anticipate that Google Spanner, CockroachDB and similar databases will become the go-tos in combination with ZEIT Now.

So what do most of your current customers do for data storage? I mean, I doubt they all use CosmosDB? (simply because it's not particularly mainstream)

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#57
post #8

Yep. Pretty soon. You write code. You create a docker file. You find a place to run the docker file with your code [cheapest!]. Run it through your tests. Monitor it. The end. No vpcs,salts, puppets, sshs,chefs, horses,anisbles, cats,ec2s,devops,noops, sysadmins, kubernetes or chaos monkeys required.

this wont be popular but I always felt like docker was a step backwards in order to regroup and take a giant leap forward. I went from right clicking and deploying from visual studio to SSH and configuring dockerfiles, docker compose, even nginx.conf to loadbalance. You do get more bang for the buck with such setup but its too much work on infrastructure and less time for development. edit: add kubernetes to it, alth…

> although AKS and GKE being free

I‘m a developer too and I feel the burden too. Can you tell what you mean here?

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#58
post #6

Looks great for basic websites but it's missing the biggest and most difficult piece of cloud infrastructure. The DATABASE! Today you'd have to open up your cloud DB provider to the world since Zeit can't provide a list of IPs to whitelist. This is a showstopper for me unfortunately.

From what I've seen, when people talk about serverless there's 2 camps.

Functions makes life easier camp. Serverless development and deployments have nicer properties which make them easier to reason about and eliminate entire classes of errors.

Functions make edge computing possible camp. Serverless functions can be deployed in datacenters around the globe close to your users, offloading compute from your core and improving latency.

Now let's talk about DB semantics. You and many other people in the first camp probably want your business logic on strongly-consistent SQL transactions. That's good, it's the right semantics for the job. But it's incompatible with the edge model where the functions are decoupled from the central datastore.

So I think that you're asking for something the community isn't mature enough to provide yet. The momentum is towards unification where we need stratification (with respect to coupling).

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#59
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you discover that the thing you are building requires more than a single application running in a single container and you end up building an entire "Operating System" around your containers and the circle starts all over again. Complexity is hardly ever in the solution, but mostly in the problem. Single solutions to complex problems often ignore/forget important parts of the problem and they come back to bite…

That's called Kubernetes

That's the joke.

Re: Serverless Docker Beta

#60

Yep. Pretty soon. You write code. You create a docker file. You find a place to run the docker file with your code [cheapest!]. Run it through your tests. Monitor it. The end. No vpcs,salts, puppets, sshs,chefs, horses,anisbles, cats,ec2s,devops,noops, sysadmins, kubernetes or chaos monkeys required.

Half the stuff you described there solve different problems to docker. Not to mention that docker doesn't solve all problems in infrastructure.

I like to think of docker like git. It solves some problems with distributing data but it doesn't solve the problem of developers writing code, writing tests, pipelines, etc. Nor even problems with 3rd party APIs etc. Obviously this isn't a perfect analogy but my point is docker isn't a magical silver bullet.

I've worked in places where their solution to everything was "docker" and it honestly caused more complexity problems than it solved. That's not to say I don't like docker; in fact I've been a big advocate for containerisation long before docker was a thing. However like with any tech, the key is using the right tool for the right job instead of attacking every screw with the same hammer.

Post reply on HN