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

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

sbov wrote: post #51

kauju wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by joecot » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 5:02 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…

Post by danharaj » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #61

danharaj wrote: post #23

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> The reason "NoSQL" dbs got popular are because in my experience Monolithic large relational databases are hard to scale. I've met a lot of people whomst thought they had to scale that big. Very few handled anything that couldn't run off a beefy postgres installation. The purpose of a system is what it does. People don't use nosql to scale because they don't need to scale, so what does it do? People use nosql to not…

> Very few handled anything that couldn't run off a beefy postgres installation. Beefy postgres would get you to 99.9% availability at best, with pretty bad tail latency and would cost quite a bit to operate. As it turns out, very few can actually live with that. And even infamous MongoDB can do better at this than PostgreSQL. Ignorance simply makes your business less competitive.

Post by all_blue_chucks » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

rawrmaan wrote: post #20

paulgb wrote: post #16

I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures. I recently developed a service[1] with the serverless framework and it was the first time I enjoyed developing server-side code since the era of PHP on shared hosts, where you could just upload code and refresh the page. There's something freeing about never having to think about the server process or what happens if the server is po…

I think a lot of people have tried “serverless” and found it to present more challenges than it solves. How, for example, do you connect to a Postgres database from Lambda/Cloud Functions? As far as I can tell, the answer is: You don’t, you use a different database. No-worries devops experiences are nothing new. See Heroku.

Post by castlecrasher2 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 5:33 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #45

manigandham wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it should really just be called Functions-as-a-service, and they are great for single-focus reactive/connective processing and 1-off tasks but are not a replacement for everything as people try to use it for.

As far as I know, serverless isn't just FaaS. As you pointed out FaaS is to connect things, nothing more. For me serverless is pay-as-you go pricing, no over- or under-provisioning and last but not least, no server-management. Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, AppSync, Device Farm, Aurora, etc. are all serverless.