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Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#71

Post by cpheimbach »

I have built an internal use image library, (uploading, resizing etc handled by lambda) for companies in the fashion and retail business. I found lambda a great pain until discovered aws codestar for whole serverless (and other projects) and aws SAM cli for functions itself.

I really want to go all in but:

Biggest drawback for me are js coldstart times (a lot more than python but I only used node so far) and that they don’t perform well with AWS RDS. Reason being that for SQL DB access you have to put a lambda into a vpc and that makes coldstart horribly slow. Furthermore you can’t pool lambda requests easily and it of require a pooling service and logic to repeat/hold on refused connections.

That’s all too much brain and defies the purpose I think For my usecase at last.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#72

Post by kiallmacinnes »

jdavis703 wrote: post #22

Yes, at my last company we needed to generate Open Graph thumbnails that composited several images together. We decided to use a serverless architecture that basically shelled out to an ImageMagick command and then pushed the thumbnail to S3 which was served via a CDN. The main problem we ran in to was a lack of processing power, but the new options from AWS solved our issues. I'd definitely do it again.

I think this gets at the core of why I think "100% serverless" isn't the right move for many projects.

If you decide you're never going to boot a machine and manage it yourself, you're locked into the exact set of choices your cloud had made available for you. When your project has a need that's not covered, you're stuck.

I'm not talking about vendor lock in here, purely about the reduced flexibility within a given vendor if you choose to never manage a server yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#73

Post by bitL »

Deep Learning classifier services via AWS Chalice. It's trivial. However, 50MB/250MB lambda limit is a pain, one has to cut down TensorFlow, Keras etc. significantly before deployment (doable but difficult) or do some S3 tricks with /tmp. I wish they allowed increasing this limit for extra money. It's cheaper than EC2 Elastic Bean Stalk though.

I wouldn't do that again; I can waste time on more interesting things than to hack artificial limits of architecture that will be changed at some point anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#74

Post by eksemplar »

We’re currently using Xamarin and azure as a backend, though not serverless yet as stuff like cosmos pricing is still too expensive. But using Xamarin, which is terrible on its own, we’re also splitting our clients up in two languages. I’d like if we could adopt flutter and angularDart for clients, and I’d really like to run some of the backend in something like Firebase / cloud firestore.

I’m not sure if google is a good option in terms of privacy and EU legislation though. I have my lawyers looking into it currently, but to be honest I’d love if Microsoft made an Azure alternative and fully embraced dart for azure.

This is probably unlikely, but it would be really awesome.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#75

Post by kbyatnal »

pedalpete wrote: post #9

We have our backend processing for both https://doarama.com and https://ayvri.com done in lambda. All of https://ayvri.com is built using serverless. (we'll be migrating from doarama to ayvri in the coming weeks) For our processing we handled 200k uploads in one hour on ayvri when we where building scenes for the Wings for Life event (the World's largest organized run). When just relying on serverless triggering an e…

Why was the cost high when relying on triggering from S3? Isn't lambda charged per invocation?

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#76

Post by nzoschke »

technics256 wrote: post #65
mabbo wrote: post #48

Just the opposite of serious for me. Example: there's a website for all the weather radar stations in Canada that lets you see the last two hours of 10-minute radar snapshots. I wanted a dump of them to try some ML algorithms, but even after requests and emails there simply wasn't one. So I set up a lambda to run every hour, load the website for all 31 weather stations and save all 6 images from the last hour to S3.…

As someobe new to serverless, is your code available to study as a pseudo tutorial?

I have a boilerplate app / tutorial here:

https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#77

Post by lifeisstillgood »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #14

I have spent the last year and a half building a completely serverless production service on Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB (along with the standard auxiliary services like CW, SNS, Route53, S3, CF, X-Ray, etc.). It was a lot of work establishing new patterns for many of the operational aspects, particularly custom CW metrics and A/B deployments with Lambda traffic shifting, but in the end everything is set up nic…

what is the business model around this - I mean 18 months to get "set up nicely" strikes me as hard to justify to upper management that is not invested already

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#78

Post by pragnesh »

atmosx wrote: post #59
bufferoverflow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you store your state? I assume DynamoDB part isn't serverless.

DDB is serverless in the sense that you don't have to worry about scalability issues, but you have to worry about design issues[1] if you want to take advantage of everything DynamoDB has to offer. I find dynamo's autoscaling very problematic: It's both slow to kick-in and you can scale down 4 times in 24h, not cost-effective if you have spikes. [1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

now aws allow to decrease throughput 27 times day. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#79

Post by nihil75 »

rgbrenner wrote: post #7
tucaz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lot's of empty claims. > some serious shortcoming and a lot more work needs to be put into these serverless platforms Not actionable at all > The approach they're taking I don't think will last No reason given > It really needs a redesign/restructure Nothing here too > And maybe they'll improve it enough by then to make it viable What makes it (un)viable?

That's fair. I'm the founder of a company building a serverless platform. I didn't want to write specifics because it may reveal details about our approach.

In that case you might wanna take another look at the answers here. Notice how they all use Amazon Lambda?

If you intend to compete with them - you might wanna reconsider.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#80

Post by jacquesm »

segmondy wrote: post #56
jacquesm wrote: post #20

I can't name any names for obvious reasons or give you more hints about what industry this company is in but I just did DD on a very impressive outfit that ran their entire company on Google's cloud platform, it held about 500T of data and held up amazingly well under load. I was super impressed with how they had set this all up and they were extremely well aware of all the limitations and do's and dont's of that par…

There's a big difference between running on GCP and "serverless architecture" Did they have everything running with Google Cloud Functions?

Context is everything they say.
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