Chalice: Python Serverless Microframework for AWS

Post by Animats » Tue, Jul 12, 2016, 2:01 AM UTC

nashadelic wrote: post #61

collyw wrote: post #2

Ok, I have seen the phrase "serverless" a few times recently. Can someone explain to me what it is (as I am pretty sure it involves a server - it runs on AWS ffs) and why I should want to use it? And most importantly, is it web scale?

Well, if you look at how we've done things over the years: - We used to have our own machines in our own data centers - Then we started renting machines in data centers - We then moved to the cloud model where we would get compute capacity on demand. But the minimum unit was an hour - But what if you could deploy your code and you were only charged for the compute and memory you take for the fulfillment of that reque…

Post by nathancahill » Tue, Jul 12, 2016, 2:29 AM UTC

010a wrote: post #72

AReallyGoodName wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found Lambda to be really ridiculously fucking cheap. We moved image resizing onto it and saved thousands a month. Don't compare the cost of Lambda per 100ms to the cost of a virtual machine per month since Lambda only charges as you use it. You'd have to have the CPU pegged at 100% usage to make that a fair comparison. Mind you even if you took the cost of Lambda per 100ms and multiplied that out for a monthly…

I would say that it strongly depends on the type of requests you are handling. Saying that you can run a 1GB lambda for 1 month nonstop for $32 does not impress me, and its kind of strange that it impresses you. You could run a t2.micro with the same RAM for $6/mo if you reserve it for a year. And if you want to give that t2.micro a workload where it only has to respond to 1 request at a time, the same terms we are a…

Post by 010a » Tue, Jul 12, 2016, 2:33 AM UTC

nathancahill wrote: post #73

010a wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that it strongly depends on the type of requests you are handling. Saying that you can run a 1GB lambda for 1 month nonstop for $32 does not impress me, and its kind of strange that it impresses you. You could run a t2.micro with the same RAM for $6/mo if you reserve it for a year. And if you want to give that t2.micro a workload where it only has to respond to 1 request at a time, the same terms we are a…

I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but I'd like to point out that micro instances also have diminished networking (besides processing/memory). Depending on what you're doing, this could be a factor.

Post by johnwheeler » Tue, Jul 12, 2016, 3:13 AM UTC

johnwheeler wrote: post #67

niftich wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. That being said, there's nothing stopping you from emitting, say, HTML from such a function. But there's nothing really helping you either. It's basically function calls in the cloud; a remote procedure call where the remote procedure is executing on their infrastructure.

I'm also guessing there's no session state or cookies?

Post by bmelton » Tue, Jul 12, 2016, 6:03 AM UTC

eli wrote: post #50

ak217 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked into doing this. Flask is too integrated with the WSGI protocol to be easily adapted to this model. It presupposes a number of things about the request and response protocol that are not true in Lambda. You would end up having to write an unwieldy WSGI emulation layer (what Zappa did) and still wouldn't be able to achieve 100% WSGI compatibility, breaking a subset of the plugins. Most people love Flask be…

You're not wrong, but there are plenty of examples of using Flash without WSGI. I use Flask-Frozen to generate static sites from the CLI, for example.