4 ms·

I think biggest news here is the possibility to share a server with someone else, with amazon acting as a broker of CPU time. With virtual machines, we started

by motoboi 11y ago

I think biggest news here is the possibility to share a server with someone else, with amazon acting as a broker of CPU time. With virtual machines, we started to share physical resources which were otherwise wasted in dormancy. But even virtual machines were a waste of resources, as you need someone to set them up, keep them online and working. What if you could share the money you spent with those people and their knowledge? Amazon just did that to you. All some people want is to run code somewhere on the internet. Amazon gather them together to share a server and an admin team. In my point of view, Amazon Lambda is a huge improvement in efficiency for people around the world, as I (or someone else) can pay for a very tiny part of the work of a very specialized sysadmin and focus on my code.

manigandham 11y ago
Yea I can see that. Lambda is cool and there are some niche cases where it's useful... However when talking about microservices, any non-trivial app quickly gets extremely complicated to setup and actually more inefficient in the amount of time it takes to execute each request. And probably more expensive since there still have to be servers somewhere, always ready to run your app and with all the management and orchestration layer on top. Also VM technology is sufficiently advanced that they can be multitenant on the same base hardware very efficiently and consume almost no resources while in a sleep state. With live-migration and auto-scaling advancements it's not a big deal.
twic 11y ago
If your scale is small (you're in the 'two people in a garage' phase of your company), then the cost of having your own server is small, even though you waste most of it. Hetzner will rent you a real physical server with an x86 processor and 32 GB of RAM for about 40 euros a month. I'm sure you can get smaller virtual servers elsewhere for less. If your scale is large, you have enough work to make full use of however many servers you rent. Reducing infrastructure waste at small scale seems pointless to me. The actual cash money saving is just lost in the noise. The only way i can see that i could be wrong is if there's a suppressed demand for huge numbers of tiny-scale services. Is there?
- Goranek 11y ago
  It doesn't matter if you are big or small, you're always wasting resources.. Just count how many servers you have using <50% cpu. By having thousands of users, amazon can organize servers in a way, no cpu is wasted.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    If they kept CPUs 100% busy, how would they deal with a surge in demand or a failure situation? You HAVE to keep spare capacity or 1 failover crashes your entire fleet of 5 billion servers. You could correctly argue that usage increases with scale.. so while you with 1 app can maybe only keep a server 20% busy, Amazon can afford to keep their servers 70% busy.. which is part of the story. But the other part is you are paying for the convenience. You can get raw CPU way cheaper than what lambda gives it out at. Even if you only kept your CPU usage at 10-20% - for example Digital Ocean would still be cheaper than the Amazon Lambda app version. You are literally paying a surcharge to not have to set up your own servers, or deal with maintenance. I find it very unlikely you will save big money with lambda over your own servers.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  > Reducing infrastructure waste at small scale seems pointless to me Agreed. I think what it avoids though is setting up ansible + puppet + firewall + updates + monitoring + blah blah stuff you do to secure and dev-ops a prod app (for a baby app). You can half-arse this stuff in a day for a new company. I assume the defaults of lambda will be a little more secure... but amazon security is pretty complicated to set up right, so not totally sure what the max win will be.
- spdustin 11y ago
  My scale is unpredictable. I don't sell software, I sell consulting and training services. To make our business run smoothly and maximize the available time of the two of us who run the place, we can't be held down by managing servers and services. Investing in things like API Gateway and Lambda gives me the ability to keep my programming desires satisfied, while reducing the friction of tedious, time wasting operations, like automatically encoding a video of a class, extracting thumbnails, and setting permissions via API calls back to our home-brewed DAM system to make the video available for our students. Sure, I could do it myself each time. Six times per day of teaching. And turn down the process priority so it won't interfere with the rest of my job. The costs of using AWS at that scale, while certainly nothing like the scale some of you are dealing with, are a considerable savings over the hourly rate I can charge for the time spent in my subject domain, and would have otherwise lost. We manage VMs for classes already, and most of that is now automated by our Hubot. In the coming weeks, the services/sites/apps we do have running will be migrated over to the docker-based infrastructure I'm building (in my copious free time, ha!), and the services therein will be interconnected with API Gateway and Lambda functions. It's a beautiful thing. I'm really quite pleased with it, and proud of what we've been able to do. I'm know that I'm not alone, and maybe this post will encourage others in similar situations to share their experiences too. Maybe my peers don't frequent HN - that's an unknown to me, I guess. But there are far more entrepreneurs like me who enjoy the job we do, and will do everything we can to offload the time sucking administrivia to some other system, especially if we get to flex our programming muscles along the way.
dragonwriter 11y ago
That kind of server sharing is exactly what all cloud platforms (IaaS, PaaS,etc.), as opposed to dedicated servers, are about. And that without having to set up virtual servers on an IaaS like EC2 isn't new, lies of people, big and small, were doing PaaS offerings long before Lambda.

by motoboi 11y ago

manigandham 11y ago

Yea I can see that. Lambda is cool and there are some niche cases where it's useful... However when talking about microservices, any non-trivial app quickly gets extremely complicated to setup and actually more inefficient in the amount of time it takes to execute each request. And probably more expensive since there still have to be servers somewhere, always ready to run your app and with all the management and orchestration layer on top. Also VM technology is sufficiently advanced that they can be multitenant on the same base hardware very efficiently and consume almost no resources while in a sleep state. With live-migration and auto-scaling advancements it's not a big deal.

twic 11y ago

If your scale is small (you're in the 'two people in a garage' phase of your company), then the cost of having your own server is small, even though you waste most of it. Hetzner will rent you a real physical server with an x86 processor and 32 GB of RAM for about 40 euros a month. I'm sure you can get smaller virtual servers elsewhere for less. If your scale is large, you have enough work to make full use of however many servers you rent. Reducing infrastructure waste at small scale seems pointless to me. The actual cash money saving is just lost in the noise. The only way i can see that i could be wrong is if there's a suppressed demand for huge numbers of tiny-scale services. Is there?

Goranek 11y ago
It doesn't matter if you are big or small, you're always wasting resources.. Just count how many servers you have using <50% cpu. By having thousands of users, amazon can organize servers in a way, no cpu is wasted.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  If they kept CPUs 100% busy, how would they deal with a surge in demand or a failure situation? You HAVE to keep spare capacity or 1 failover crashes your entire fleet of 5 billion servers. You could correctly argue that usage increases with scale.. so while you with 1 app can maybe only keep a server 20% busy, Amazon can afford to keep their servers 70% busy.. which is part of the story. But the other part is you are paying for the convenience. You can get raw CPU way cheaper than what lambda gives it out at. Even if you only kept your CPU usage at 10-20% - for example Digital Ocean would still be cheaper than the Amazon Lambda app version. You are literally paying a surcharge to not have to set up your own servers, or deal with maintenance. I find it very unlikely you will save big money with lambda over your own servers.
brianwawok 11y ago
> Reducing infrastructure waste at small scale seems pointless to me Agreed. I think what it avoids though is setting up ansible + puppet + firewall + updates + monitoring + blah blah stuff you do to secure and dev-ops a prod app (for a baby app). You can half-arse this stuff in a day for a new company. I assume the defaults of lambda will be a little more secure... but amazon security is pretty complicated to set up right, so not totally sure what the max win will be.
spdustin 11y ago
My scale is unpredictable. I don't sell software, I sell consulting and training services. To make our business run smoothly and maximize the available time of the two of us who run the place, we can't be held down by managing servers and services. Investing in things like API Gateway and Lambda gives me the ability to keep my programming desires satisfied, while reducing the friction of tedious, time wasting operations, like automatically encoding a video of a class, extracting thumbnails, and setting permissions via API calls back to our home-brewed DAM system to make the video available for our students. Sure, I could do it myself each time. Six times per day of teaching. And turn down the process priority so it won't interfere with the rest of my job. The costs of using AWS at that scale, while certainly nothing like the scale some of you are dealing with, are a considerable savings over the hourly rate I can charge for the time spent in my subject domain, and would have otherwise lost. We manage VMs for classes already, and most of that is now automated by our Hubot. In the coming weeks, the services/sites/apps we do have running will be migrated over to the docker-based infrastructure I'm building (in my copious free time, ha!), and the services therein will be interconnected with API Gateway and Lambda functions. It's a beautiful thing. I'm really quite pleased with it, and proud of what we've been able to do. I'm know that I'm not alone, and maybe this post will encourage others in similar situations to share their experiences too. Maybe my peers don't frequent HN - that's an unknown to me, I guess. But there are far more entrepreneurs like me who enjoy the job we do, and will do everything we can to offload the time sucking administrivia to some other system, especially if we get to flex our programming muscles along the way.

dragonwriter 11y ago

That kind of server sharing is exactly what all cloud platforms (IaaS, PaaS,etc.), as opposed to dedicated servers, are about. And that without having to set up virtual servers on an IaaS like EC2 isn't new, lies of people, big and small, were doing PaaS offerings long before Lambda.