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Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

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Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#71

Post by ithkuil »

atoav wrote: post #48
dmitriid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs. Cloud Functions is literally code you're running in the cloud. And the moment you approach their limit(ation)s, you will see the same "rising cloud deployment costs" > Running a WASM engine on the cloud means ... a fraction of the overhead of a container or nodejs environment You do realise that there are other languages than javascript in nodejs? That there…

I sought to unserstand "serverless" but every deployment diagram I have ever seen show things that look an aweful lot like they run on... servers? Maybe I don't get the idea (and honestly I was too lazy to put in the legwork), but when I hear something like "serverless" I imagine some p2p javascript federated decentralized beast where the shared state is stored through magic and tricks with the users clients and ther…

"Server" can mean many things. A few (obvious) meanings:

* A role in the client-server model. One machine makes requests and asks for info or things to be done, and the other end executes the request.

* The physical (or virtual) machine that runs the processes that fulfill the server role

* A class of "serious" machines that do important stuff somewhere not directly facing the end user (desktop or mobile device).

* A unit of administration: the thing you log in with ssh, install/update software, rotate logs, organize user accounts on, create groups, handle file permissions, craft backup scripts, cron jobs, handle disk space, and generally care about filesystem health etc etc etc

As you correctly pointed out, the "serverless" buzzword clearly talks about code that has to run on some machine, which is not your desktop or mobile device, so it's still about the client-server model and it's still running in servers, which ultimately have ti be administered by somebody somehow.

The "less" suffix in the buzzword means that that person is not you. You don't have to manage the server.

It's hard to find a better word. Sysadminless? NoPet? JustRunIt? FocusOnMyCode?

All names have their drawbacks. My main qualm with serverless is not that there are servers involved, but that it's not clear what is serverless and what it's not.

For example, is kubernetes a serverless platform? As a user if it (not an admin) you don't need to worry about any of the good old sysadmin chores, i.e. you don't manage the actual servers where your code runs.

Otoh generally when people talk about serverless they don't talk about abstractions like kubernetes but usually about going on step further in the abstaction ladder and imagine a world that's not only "serverless" but "processless", where you don't build software and deploy it somewhere but where you write some "functions" and map of them to some endpoint and the system takes care of figuring out how to build, deploy and manage the full lifecycle.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#72

Post by paulgb »

atoav wrote: post #48
dmitriid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs. Cloud Functions is literally code you're running in the cloud. And the moment you approach their limit(ation)s, you will see the same "rising cloud deployment costs" > Running a WASM engine on the cloud means ... a fraction of the overhead of a container or nodejs environment You do realise that there are other languages than javascript in nodejs? That there…

I sought to unserstand "serverless" but every deployment diagram I have ever seen show things that look an aweful lot like they run on... servers? Maybe I don't get the idea (and honestly I was too lazy to put in the legwork), but when I hear something like "serverless" I imagine some p2p javascript federated decentralized beast where the shared state is stored through magic and tricks with the users clients and ther…

> Instead it seems like a buzzword (?) for a weirdly niche way of running things that someone with a 4 Euro/Month nginx instance that hosts 10 websites will probably never understand.

To me, serverless means that I as the developer don't have to do ongoing server maintenance work. A 4 Euro/month setup sounds great, until you find out that you never enabled log rotation and filled up the disk space, or your certificate refresh was improperly configured and now you don't have SSL, or your site gets popular for a day and the site slows to a crawl unless you add an instance.

The dream of serverless is that I can deploy code in a “set it and forget it” manner. Stuff can still break at the application layer, but should work the same at the infrastructure layer in a year as they do today, and auto-scaling happens automatically.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#73

Post by tppiotrowski »

the_common_man wrote: post #69
tppiotrowski wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a hosted static web app but want to dynamically change the tags in your index.html to provide a unique url preview for each route (/about, /careers, etc)

Why would one want to do this? For analytics?

When you share a url like a news article on Twitter or send it on Slack, iMessage etc, you get a small preview widget showing you the headline and a photo from the story.

The way this is generated is Twitter/iMessage scrapes the HTML of the url you are sharing and looks for https://imgur/adfstdd"> and displays whatever image is in the content field. Similarly the widget title is populated from

In a static html site there is only one index.html so all routes have the same meta tags unless you overwrite the index.html file using an edge worker.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#74

Post by kasey_junk »

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #68
lewisjoe wrote: post #5

This is great news. I'm really rooting for a successful trend of Serverless runtimes, mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs. While the general trend today is to back the serverless environment with Javascript runtimes (Cloudflare runs its edge on top of V8, Netlify uses deno, most other serverless runtimes use nodejs), I'm optimistic that WebAssembly will take over this space eventually, for a bunc…

Really, really dumb question. I've seen a lot of node/python/etc serverless offerings. Is there something where you just provide a binary and its executed each time? For example, I write a simple single responsibility piece of code in Go `add_to_cart.go` and build it, deploy it, and somehow map it to some network request. dot slash pass args, and return the result? No need to have containers or runtime?

AWS lambda’s work that way.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#75

Post by rmbyrro »

mavsman wrote: post #60
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #46

Netlify pricing has always been confusing to me, but I'm not entirely sure why. I guess I'm more accustomed to pay-as-you-go in this space (CFW) than tiered plans (Netlify bundles their features into starter/pro/business). It seems that the free plan is 3M invocations/mo, starter is 15M/mo, and business is 150M/mo, but there aren't any ways to increase those limits (business says to contact them for higher limits). P…

Different strokes for different folks. This has been one of the big knocks on AWS, that a poor little old lady can setup a "free" AWS account then when her website (and accompanying Lambda function) goes viral she gets hit with a $100k bill from uncle Jeff.

Would the Lady prefer to let her site go down?

I don't understand this way of thinking. One of the main benefits of serverless is scalability, peace of mind for precisely when you go viral.

If you're doing something good, especially if you're selling something good, all you want is to go viral. And of you went viral, you don't mind paying the AWS costs, which should be tiny compared to your revenue. Just need to care about your unit economics.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#76

Post by foxbarrington »

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #46

Netlify pricing has always been confusing to me, but I'm not entirely sure why. I guess I'm more accustomed to pay-as-you-go in this space (CFW) than tiered plans (Netlify bundles their features into starter/pro/business). It seems that the free plan is 3M invocations/mo, starter is 15M/mo, and business is 150M/mo, but there aren't any ways to increase those limits (business says to contact them for higher limits). P…

Netlify's creative pricing is what lost me as a customer. They decided to start reading our git commits to decide how much to charge us. Instead of charging for usage of bandwidth and build minutes they decided to charge based on how many different authors we had--even though those people never interacted with Netlify or even knew how we were deployed. If we didn't hurry up and migrate to Render.com this would have taken our bill from $1.5k/year to over $25k/year.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#77

Post by teleclimber »

jrockway wrote: post #56
olah_1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about WASM. I am sort of worried that Deno may be too late tbh. Why would I bother with an interpreted language at all when I can code in any language I want and run it anywhere with WASM?

What is "any language" these days? I feel like WebAssembly's day will come when one of those is Javascript, and so far that hasn't happened. Go's support is pretty good (with tinygo offering a tiny runtime more suited to this application). Rust appears to support compiling directly to WebAssembly, and there are some smaller languages like AssemblyScript and Lua with support. I'm guessing plain C works fine. Then ther…

> The isolation aspect was interesting in the days before Firecracker...

I don't think Firecracker's existence makes WASM's isolation uninteresting. First, I think you are looking at way more resources running a full VM (even a "micro" VM) compared to a WASM runtime. I think startup times are not comparable either, so if that matters you'll find WASM to be the way to go.

Second, WASM's capability-based security model is wonderful for giving the untrusted code the things it needs to work with. With a VM, you have to stitch together with shared directories, virtual eth bridges or, linux capabilities, maybe some cgroups, and who knows what else. (Granted you may need to do some of that with WASM too, but less so).

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#78

Post by manquer »

wmf wrote: post #51
wizwit999 wrote: post #18

big-time red flag that they're using deno's infra... wouldn't trust that

It sounds like Netlify is essentially reselling a third-party service here. Isn't operating infrastructure Netlify's job? Why outsource this? Can requests end up taking circuitous paths where Netlify and Deno's infra don't line up?

Netlify also uses aws and rackspace . They are in the business of selling PaaS on top of IaaS by adding value to developer workflows .

They could host their own infra at large enough scale when that makes sense, the same way AWS decided after many years to make their own chips (graviton), but that is not their core identity like AWS is not a chip manufacturer.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#79

Post by pid-1 »

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #68
lewisjoe wrote: post #5

This is great news. I'm really rooting for a successful trend of Serverless runtimes, mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs. While the general trend today is to back the serverless environment with Javascript runtimes (Cloudflare runs its edge on top of V8, Netlify uses deno, most other serverless runtimes use nodejs), I'm optimistic that WebAssembly will take over this space eventually, for a bunc…

Really, really dumb question. I've seen a lot of node/python/etc serverless offerings. Is there something where you just provide a binary and its executed each time? For example, I write a simple single responsibility piece of code in Go `add_to_cart.go` and build it, deploy it, and somehow map it to some network request. dot slash pass args, and return the result? No need to have containers or runtime?

That's how every FaaS (Function as a Service) offering works.

A caveat is that most non trivial applications need something more than running a function.

You might need secrets management, ephemeral and non ephemeral storage, relational databases, non relational databases, dependency management, AAA capabilities, observability, queues/async, caching, custom domains... That's where said offerings differ.

EDIT: actually most FaaS offerings take code as input, not binaries. I'm not sure if that was the relevant part of your question. If it was, then yeah I don't know of such service.

Re: Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno

#80

Post by dom96 »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #73
the_common_man wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would one want to do this? For analytics?

When you share a url like a news article on Twitter or send it on Slack, iMessage etc, you get a small preview widget showing you the headline and a photo from the story. The way this is generated is Twitter/iMessage scrapes the HTML of the url you are sharing and looks for https://imgur/adfstdd "> and displays whatever image is in the content field. Similarly the widget title is populated from In a static html site…

> In a static html site there is only one index.html so all routes have the same meta tags unless you overwrite the index.html file using an edge worker.

I guess this is specifically for SPA static sites? I would expect a static html site to have different html files for each page, like blog/2020-09-09-title.html and that could then have its own metatags, so no need for this dynamic rewriting, unless I'm missing something.

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