we recently interviewed Erik and touched on this list: https://www.latent.space/p/modal
and how Modal exemplifies a lot of the ideas he's been looking for. check it out incl our show notes!
Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
#52Here's something very specific I've been thinking about recently. I think Google Cloud Cloud Run is obscenely ahead of its time. Its a product that's adjacent to so many competitors, yet has no direct competitor, and has managed to drive a stake into that niche in a way that makes it such a valuable product. Its serverless, but not "Lambda Serverless" or "Vercel Serverless" which forces you to adopt an entirely diffe…
At the risk of being on the outside here, I'd have to agree.
To go a bit further I'm honestly quite interested(?) in how CGP has sought to differentiate itself from the two other providers by offering this kind of "plug and play" feel to cloud. Certainly there is value to be gained from the absolutely granular service offerings of AWS/Azure, but there's a point when it starts to feel like all I'm doing is building control towers for island landing strips.
I just want my cloud providers ML service to talk to the data lake on the same cloud tenant without having to architect my way through 15 network nics, 30 service accounts, and 4 VDI...
Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I built a CD for AWS (beakerstudio.com). The author is correct about everything being super complicated. Tools like Terraform help automate changes, but you still have to _learn_ all of the strange ways AWS works and juggle configuration requirements that are oftentimes so bizarre it makes you wonder if they are trying to funnel developers into support plans. Honestly, the experience of building Beaker Studio made me…
Been looking at a few solutions similar to yours! I'm currently on Render and looking to move elsewhere so I can have more control and particularly insight into system metrics. Do you support zero downtime deploys? It wasn't clear to me from your home page.
Tasks are run on ECS with Fargate. If you setup your server with a load balancer, which is required on ECS to point DNS to the server, then the load balancer will wait for health checks to pass before switching over to the newly deployed tasks. ECS with Fargate is reliable in my experience, and Beaker Studio uses an alternate installation of itself to deploy itself, so everything is dogfooded. A big drawback imo is that AWS is expensive and Beaker Studio does not attempt to hack its way around their pricing. Right now I'm not billing users (within reason) who provide feedback, so please feel free to sign up and email me your notes.
Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
#54Here's something very specific I've been thinking about recently. I think Google Cloud Cloud Run is obscenely ahead of its time. Its a product that's adjacent to so many competitors, yet has no direct competitor, and has managed to drive a stake into that niche in a way that makes it such a valuable product. Its serverless, but not "Lambda Serverless" or "Vercel Serverless" which forces you to adopt an entirely diffe…
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something but what you’re describing is what AWS Lambda has been able to do for a long time now. You can run an api in a docker container with no Lambda-specific code.
Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
#55Here's something very specific I've been thinking about recently. I think Google Cloud Cloud Run is obscenely ahead of its time. Its a product that's adjacent to so many competitors, yet has no direct competitor, and has managed to drive a stake into that niche in a way that makes it such a valuable product. Its serverless, but not "Lambda Serverless" or "Vercel Serverless" which forces you to adopt an entirely diffe…
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something but what you’re describing is what AWS Lambda has been able to do for a long time now. You can run an api in a docker container with no Lambda-specific code.
My understanding is that your docker image must have the lambda runtime interface client installed on the image in order to work.
It's not a huge step usually to add the RIC, but it's a bit more tied in to AWS than CloudRun is, which can run arbitrary docker images, if I understand.
Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
#56Here's something very specific I've been thinking about recently. I think Google Cloud Cloud Run is obscenely ahead of its time. Its a product that's adjacent to so many competitors, yet has no direct competitor, and has managed to drive a stake into that niche in a way that makes it such a valuable product. Its serverless, but not "Lambda Serverless" or "Vercel Serverless" which forces you to adopt an entirely diffe…
Azure has container _instances_ - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/products/container-instanc...
DigitalOcean iss not wildly far off it either.
ECS + Fargate is the closest AWS has to it, but you need to do IAM and Networking to utilise it. If you're in AWS already, it's pretty good, albeit with some frustrating limits
Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
#57So true. why are we still paying for idle resources in 2024?
Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something but what you’re describing is what AWS Lambda has been able to do for a long time now. You can run an api in a docker container with no Lambda-specific code.
My understanding is that your docker image must have the lambda runtime interface client installed on the image in order to work. It's not a huge step usually to add the RIC, but it's a bit more tied in to AWS than CloudRun is, which can run arbitrary docker images, if I understand.
That's right - you have to package awslabs/aws-lambda-web-adapter into your docker image which proxies the API-GW/ALB requests through.
Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
#59Here's something very specific I've been thinking about recently. I think Google Cloud Cloud Run is obscenely ahead of its time. Its a product that's adjacent to so many competitors, yet has no direct competitor, and has managed to drive a stake into that niche in a way that makes it such a valuable product. Its serverless, but not "Lambda Serverless" or "Vercel Serverless" which forces you to adopt an entirely diffe…
Azure has container _instances_ - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/products/container-instanc... DigitalOcean iss not wildly far off it either. ECS + Fargate is the closest AWS has to it, but you need to do IAM and Networking to utilise it. If you're in AWS already, it's pretty good, albeit with some frustrating limits
Yup my bad, I meant ACI, not ACS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are actually not close to Cloud Run. Cloud Run's differentiator is its scaling metric; it scales with incoming requests, and has strict configuration to assert that each replica only handle N concurrent requests. You could maybe get something like this set up on ACI or Fargate, but it'd require stringing together five or six different products. You can also definitely wire up those to autoscale on CPU%, but (1) this is not scale-to-zero, and (2) CPU% kinda sucks as a scaling metric, right? Idk I've never been happy with systems that autoscale on CPU%.
Re: Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist (2021)
#60Here's something very specific I've been thinking about recently. I think Google Cloud Cloud Run is obscenely ahead of its time. Its a product that's adjacent to so many competitors, yet has no direct competitor, and has managed to drive a stake into that niche in a way that makes it such a valuable product. Its serverless, but not "Lambda Serverless" or "Vercel Serverless" which forces you to adopt an entirely diffe…
Azure has container _instances_ - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/products/container-instanc... DigitalOcean iss not wildly far off it either. ECS + Fargate is the closest AWS has to it, but you need to do IAM and Networking to utilise it. If you're in AWS already, it's pretty good, albeit with some frustrating limits
Container Instances is bad though, and you'll regret using it.
There is Azure Container Apps but it requires some more setup in advance.