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Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#61

Post by lucian1900 »

_pmf_ wrote: post #54
jondubois wrote: post #36

Amazon Lambda is like Microsoft Windows was in its early stages. It's a fast-growing, closed/proprietary system for running apps. I wouldn't be surprised if it achieves a near-monopoly for a while... But I think that eventually more flexible open source solutions will take over. Open platforms like Docker and Kubernetes will likely replace Lambda just as Linux replaced Windows on the server-side.

> I wouldn't be surprised if it achieves a near-monopoly for a while. I wonder why Google is so passive in this regard; sometimes I think they have an aversion to honest money and real products.

They've had App Engine for many years. They're the pioneers in this field, if anything.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#62

Post by vidarh »

cyberferret wrote: post #21
williamle8300 wrote: post #5

Amazon wants to control markets by leading in with "convenience" factor but they will sheist you. Buy stuff from Amazon... but for Pete's sake don't make them a core project dependency for your software projects. You only have yourself to blame when they start ratcheting up their prices.

I've used AWS since pretty much the first year they offered EC2 instances, and in that time, I believe their costs have only gone DOWN over the years. Not just EC2 - we use S3, Glacier, Elastic Beanstalk, IoT, DynamoDB, RDS, Lambda, VPC, CloudFront, CloudWatch, Polly, Rekognition ... and I don't think I have ever seen a price increase /hr or /Gb in all that time.

That may be true, but the only reason they're not increasing their prices is that their prices are insanely high to begin with. E.g. their bandwidth prices are about 40 times as high as what I'd pay if I ever reach the included cap for my servers.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#63

Post by inopinatus »

Sephr wrote: post #41

Is anyone else slightly peeved by the popularity of this misnomer? If you are paying for servers , your app isn't serverless . Real serverless to me means decentralized p2p and offline apps. I also consider p2p-routed apps with centralized control serverless as long as they continue to function in a read-only state when the control server is down.

Not peeved at all. Actually I find the persnickety language-lawyering far more irksome.

It is even specifically incorrect to claim that AWS lambda functions always run on servers; they have at least three distinct execution environments, one of which is IoT devices via AWS Greengrass another being inside the Cloudfront CDN. It's also a stretch to suggest that the primary execution environment for AWS Lambda is a server device; that is not AFAIK specified anywhere.

So, although the term itself may annoy you, the counter-claim that "it must be servers" is a demonstrably false assumption.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#64

Post by jupiter90000 »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #53
isuckatcoding wrote: post #4

Sorry what's new about this? Aren't all the pieces existing AWS services? They've just put it in a nice graphic with the architecture drawn out. Not saying I don't like the architecture (actually think it's quite useful for many scenarios). Not sold on using DynamoDB (I'd rather use a traditional SQL store).

I really agree with you on this one, my acquaintances that have actually used this, use it for running bulk jobs that are triggered by S3 changes.

I wanted lambda for a bulk data processing task that would have been a nice use of it, but the 5 minute max on a process wasn't going to work for my use case. Maybe someday I'll find a use for it

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#65

Post by cpach »

kagx wrote: post #59
Sephr wrote: post #41

Is anyone else slightly peeved by the popularity of this misnomer? If you are paying for servers , your app isn't serverless . Real serverless to me means decentralized p2p and offline apps. I also consider p2p-routed apps with centralized control serverless as long as they continue to function in a read-only state when the control server is down.

Serverless term is a little bit confusing at the beginning, but it is the same thing as saying that WiFi is wireless.

A mesh network can be wireless ;-)

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#66

Post by virtualized »

melvinram wrote: post #56
Sephr wrote: post #41

Is anyone else slightly peeved by the popularity of this misnomer? If you are paying for servers , your app isn't serverless . Real serverless to me means decentralized p2p and offline apps. I also consider p2p-routed apps with centralized control serverless as long as they continue to function in a read-only state when the control server is down.

It's called serverless because, for all intents and purposes, you don't know or control: * how many real or virtual servers are running your code. * how the servers were provisioned or setup. * how to access the servers (either via SSH or programmatically), either than through predefined APIs. * what happens when the servers break. * what causes the servers to disappear. * etc. The "server" concept has been abstracte…

These were already the promises of "the Cloud" until everyone started calling their Raspberry Pis at home a "cloud".

Now the same thing has got another stupid name: Serverless. I wonder what the same stuff will be called two years from now.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#67

Post by honestoHeminway »

Sephr wrote: post #41

Is anyone else slightly peeved by the popularity of this misnomer? If you are paying for servers , your app isn't serverless . Real serverless to me means decentralized p2p and offline apps. I also consider p2p-routed apps with centralized control serverless as long as they continue to function in a read-only state when the control server is down.

Yes, i expected it to be something akin to a peer 2 peer client, where one user hosts it for another. Stopped reading when AWS showed up.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#68

Post by virtualized »

kagx wrote: post #59
Sephr wrote: post #41

Is anyone else slightly peeved by the popularity of this misnomer? If you are paying for servers , your app isn't serverless . Real serverless to me means decentralized p2p and offline apps. I also consider p2p-routed apps with centralized control serverless as long as they continue to function in a read-only state when the control server is down.

Serverless term is a little bit confusing at the beginning, but it is the same thing as saying that WiFi is wireless.

WiFi can do without a wire where it matters.

A server cannot do anything without being a server.

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#69

Post by virtualized »

perilunar wrote: post #43
Sephr wrote: post #41

Is anyone else slightly peeved by the popularity of this misnomer? If you are paying for servers , your app isn't serverless . Real serverless to me means decentralized p2p and offline apps. I also consider p2p-routed apps with centralized control serverless as long as they continue to function in a read-only state when the control server is down.

Not just peeved, but confused. "With serverless computing, your application still runs on servers" So it's not serverless? Why are you calling it serverless?

Because server has become a synonym for "Ubuntu pet machine that developers SSH into to paste random commands from Stack Overflow". People who do that are the target audience of "serverless".

Re: Build a Serverless Web Applicaion

#70

Post by kagx »

sriram_iyengar wrote: post #30

- watchout for latencies (multi-zones apps) time of your lambda functions. - keep your lambda functions warmed up - node has better warmup time than java lambdas (not sure of python) - memory size impact of lambda functions (negligible in most cases) - manage lambda timeouts - dynamodb latencies are negligible - api gateway typically does not introduce latencies - multitenancy challenges with single store of dynamodb

> api gateway typically does not introduce latencies

I haven't checked my function thoroughly yet, but I think API gateway introduce quite a bit of latency (at least in my case). My maximum invocation time is 600ms, according to AWS Lambda monitoring tool, but network request takes around 1s (checked in chrome dev tools).

Also, worht noting is that my code is hosted in the us-east region and I'm based in Europe. I'm not sure how much latency this introduce.

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