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A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

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Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#71

Post by smrtinsert »

munk-a wrote: post #35
romanhn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's not like that sentiment is totally baseless. I've used PHP years ago and both language and core libraries were not well-designed and came with many footguns. I've heard that modern PHP with frameworks like Laravel fixed a bunch of this, so presumably it's quite capable these days. But PHP certainly wouldn't be anywhere near the top of my go-to list at this point.

Eh, at this point can we just stop with the echoing of old memes? I used PHP4 and have used it continuously up to the modern day. If it's not your choice of language that's fine - language choice is pretty unimportant in the grant scheme of things... that said, it can do everything you need it to do (outside of low level memory control). If you need bit-efficient data structures it isn't going to be a good fit... but…

I don't know a single dev across the years who has ever made php their first choice.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#72

Post by greatgib »

Treezor is not really directly a bank but more a "bank as a service" company.

Lots of companies or "neobank" that want to offer a kind of bank account, for personal or corporate use, but that don't have an official banking agreement, and not really a banking infrastructure, can use them as "white label" solutions.

All the bank accounts and banking operations will be done by treezor, but from the user point of view, he will only interact with the company and company frontend, and almost never see that it is Treezor that is operating in the background.

That being said, I don't know if their "serverless" move is a good one, because their solution is commonly known to be unreliable, and I think a lot of customers would be happy to go to another provider if it was possible.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#73

Post by solardev »

distantsounds wrote: post #70
solardev wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a perspective: PHP 7+ (the language) was wonderful, especially compared to Javascript's woefully inadequate standard library. It had so many helper functions that made even working with JSON and big data objects much easier. But having to manage its buildchain wasn't fun (meaning needing to containerize a web server, PHP-FPM, etc. for every trivial deployment). Then needing to support an OS behind it with update…

your container running the web server and php-fpm should only need to be deployed once. the point of PHP is that to update your code you just... replace the file. this sounds like a poorly designed CI pipeline that is of no fault of PHP.

What? There was no CI involved. It's more a matter of being able to spin up separate environments for different teams, projects, or especially clients. Both for security and billing and resource allocation etc.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#74

Post by deleugpn »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #64
cogman10 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my thought. Lambda works well for infrequent tasks. But hosting an API? That seems like it could get expensive pretty fast.

Lambda is $0.0000166667 for every GB-second, which works out to ~$43.20 for 30 days. For a little more ($49/month), you could get a c6g.large and get two dedicated CPU cores (ie, not the shared burstable t2/t3) and 4 GB of RAM. So yes, very expensive fast if you get much traffic at all. That c6g.large should easily be able to handle dozens (if not hundreds) of requests in parallel, especially if many of those request…

Then your EC2 instance suddenly stops working and your downtime cost you a fat contract that makes the cost of serverless a pocket change.

If you want to compare AWS Lambda with EC2, you need to bring in AWS Load Balancer, Auto Scaling, Security Upgrades for the OS, Healthcheck and many more.

Yes, Lambda is not needed in a lot of context, but if you have the expertise to use it and you want to provide enterprise-grade compliance, it's a walk in the park.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#75

Post by willsmith72 »

deleugpn wrote: post #74
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lambda is $0.0000166667 for every GB-second, which works out to ~$43.20 for 30 days. For a little more ($49/month), you could get a c6g.large and get two dedicated CPU cores (ie, not the shared burstable t2/t3) and 4 GB of RAM. So yes, very expensive fast if you get much traffic at all. That c6g.large should easily be able to handle dozens (if not hundreds) of requests in parallel, especially if many of those request…

Then your EC2 instance suddenly stops working and your downtime cost you a fat contract that makes the cost of serverless a pocket change. If you want to compare AWS Lambda with EC2, you need to bring in AWS Load Balancer, Auto Scaling, Security Upgrades for the OS, Healthcheck and many more. Yes, Lambda is not needed in a lot of context, but if you have the expertise to use it and you want to provide enterprise-grad…

Everything you listed is why I mentioned ECS though. To me it's a perfect in-between.

Bringing the long-lived server back also makes things like long-lived connections, memory caching, cold starts and database connections a non-issue again.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#76

Post by munk-a »

smrtinsert wrote: post #71
munk-a wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, at this point can we just stop with the echoing of old memes? I used PHP4 and have used it continuously up to the modern day. If it's not your choice of language that's fine - language choice is pretty unimportant in the grant scheme of things... that said, it can do everything you need it to do (outside of low level memory control). If you need bit-efficient data structures it isn't going to be a good fit... but…

I don't know a single dev across the years who has ever made php their first choice.

Hi, I'm munk-a. It's good to meet you!

I really enjoy PHP because it's easy to prototype in, there are a plethora of highly useful libraries for it, it has quite a few mature frameworks[1] and the language syntax is quite powerful.

1. Laravel gets a lot of attention but I'm a huge fan of Zend/Laminas.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#77

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

deleugpn wrote: post #74
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lambda is $0.0000166667 for every GB-second, which works out to ~$43.20 for 30 days. For a little more ($49/month), you could get a c6g.large and get two dedicated CPU cores (ie, not the shared burstable t2/t3) and 4 GB of RAM. So yes, very expensive fast if you get much traffic at all. That c6g.large should easily be able to handle dozens (if not hundreds) of requests in parallel, especially if many of those request…

Then your EC2 instance suddenly stops working and your downtime cost you a fat contract that makes the cost of serverless a pocket change. If you want to compare AWS Lambda with EC2, you need to bring in AWS Load Balancer, Auto Scaling, Security Upgrades for the OS, Healthcheck and many more. Yes, Lambda is not needed in a lot of context, but if you have the expertise to use it and you want to provide enterprise-grad…

Good points all around.

The costs certainly are not as cut-and-dry as I originally expressed it.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#78

Post by mvdwoord »

tomwojcik wrote: post #68
GaelFG wrote: post #28

I have no clues about what's better but as a french I'm amazed by the idea to delegate banking operations to a cloud provider. Last time I worked in bank IT political requirement and good practices were using their own private physical network infrastructure over all the country and data storage server rooms were literally bunkers with armed security. Is it that common around the world and 'we' just happen to have be…

I heard it used to be similar in ING but they slowly migrate some services to Azure for quite some time now. I bet they will never fully migrate (and they don't want to). Not affiliated with ING in any way, its just what I heard.

They did manage to get rid of their mainframes though ...

A imho healthy aspect of the move towards public cloud is to start with an exit strategy. This is turning out to be quite tricky. Some services though can be sourced from public cloud (ci/cd, ticketing, planning etc) but core workloads not so easy.

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#79

Post by The_Colonel »

munk-a wrote: post #60
The_Colonel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tresor means safe / vault, it's a quite natural name for a bank.

The bank isn't named Tresor - it's named Treezor. That's quite a bit closer to Trezor than Tresor. Anyways, if companies are going to use made up words for their names I'm happy to always deny them the benefit of the doubt.

My point was that both of these companies/products are named after the "Tresor".

Re: A bank runs serverless with PHP and AWS Lambda

#80

Post by [deleted] »

smrtinsert wrote: post #71
munk-a wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, at this point can we just stop with the echoing of old memes? I used PHP4 and have used it continuously up to the modern day. If it's not your choice of language that's fine - language choice is pretty unimportant in the grant scheme of things... that said, it can do everything you need it to do (outside of low level memory control). If you need bit-efficient data structures it isn't going to be a good fit... but…

I don't know a single dev across the years who has ever made php their first choice.

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