14 ms·

OpenLambda, a system for serverless computing

167 points by guifortaine 10y ago

Sleaker 10y ago
'Serverless' heh... oh man marketing is great. Just like if you have it in the cloud it's 'hardwareless' right?
- bowmessage 10y ago
  Have you checked out my codeless github package?
- adzicg 10y ago
  I don't mind this name. We're OK with 'wireless' access to Internet, although it's pretty clear that the packets will hit a wire at some point. Wireless means I'm not pulling a cord along with my phone. 'serverless' similarly means my code is not listening on a socket, although the request does come from some socket, of course
  - niftich 10y ago
    Your 'wireless' analogy is the most convincing explanation I've heard for the term yet. When I was struggling with accepting 'serverless' as a legitimate name for Function-calls-as-a-Service, I reminded myself that there's no server to SFTP or SSH into to muck about on its filesystem.
    - kowdermeister 10y ago
      Wireless is a wrong analogy. Wireless refers to the lack of cables _between_ my device and the router. "Serverless" things however are part of the same infrastructure that serve other web services. They are sitting on servers. Computers which has a CPU to execute the functions. We call them servers, therefore serverless is meaningless term. > there's no server to SFTP or SSH into There is, but you are not allowed in.
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    "Serverless" is a stupid expression. There is still a server, otherwise how do you call your functions from outside ? The most accurate description of "functions as service" is a simple pub sub architecture, some service listens to events, starts a container and execute some script/binary/whatever. In order to send events to the former service, you need a server anyway. Just because it's a different service doesn't make the stack "serverless". Whether it is on Amazon or Azure, you're still paying for the API gateway service. Here is your server. We are at a point where some dubious marketing hurts development, because that marketing is completely inaccurate and misleading. Every single developer which engages into that misleading marketing should be called out publicly for his bullshit.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
niftich 10y ago
Intriguing venture. I have some feedback, please forgive the terseness: [1] Documentation: too dense, starts off with running a shell script, but it's not immediately clear it's a quickstart, or to set up a dev environment, or what's going on. At least have an intro, or a table of contents, or something. [2] Speaking of documentation, I'm unclear where your product stands. Is it a 'build your own Lambda-as-a-Service provider', or some kind of meta-proxy-orchestrator that abstracts away from the actual LaaS provider? (if it's not the latter, why link to every commercial LaaS offering? Aren't they competitors?) [3] Our Team: "coming soon". I sympathize with having a lot to do on a website, but I care about your credentials if I am to run some code. Or maybe I don't, since lots of projects are popular on github and you don't necessarily know all of their authors in detail. But if you don't have it yet, don't highlight it in your menu. [4] Your github is barebones and links back to the aforementioned docs page. It's a bit like running in circles. Have a short readme on github, then you can link somewhere else! [5] On the front page, all 'learn more' buttons go to the same place. But, why have these at all? (see, #2. maybe move these into a 'Why' page that explains your pitch and how LaaS is big and these are the big players that are also doing it) [6] Edit: the slides are good and they help me understand what's going on.
- lostcolony 10y ago
  After staring at it a long while, and clicking a bunch of things, I assume it -must- be a build your own Lambda-as-a-Service. Otherwise, the steps to spin up a load balancer and Docker images make no sense at all. But it certainly isn't clear.
blorgle 10y ago
If you're going to build serverless thing to take advantage of market hype why not at least try and build one that has data locality like ZeroVM/ZeroCloud (http://www.zerovm.org/zerocloud.html http://www.zerovm.org/zerocloud.html) and Manta (https://www.joyent.com/manta https://www.joyent.com/manta)?
- nl 10y ago
  Have you tried ZeroVM? It isn't exactly a simple thing. I looked at it and got some stuff working in it a while ago, and it certainly limits what you can do.
kefka 10y ago
Yeah. I had a similar idea of a system of distributed serverless computing. Much to the chagrin of certain users who badmouth, it has much more to do with distributing computation on any machine. My idea was to run a cluster of Erlang nodes, connect them by Tor Hidden Services. Each machine would have 2 HSdirs, one for the unique name for that node, and a shared HSdir that will randomly talk/load balance via a DNS-like mechanism. The backend storage substrate would be IPFS. A user would write their program and add it to IPFS. My cluster would have /ipfs and /ipns mounted, and could run erlang programs and functions directly from that. That was my idea thus far. Obviously, choosing Erlang would be rather erudite and exclusive to a small subset of programmers... But its tools of distributed actors and much of the hard stuff done for you just seemed like a shoe-in.
tleunen 10y ago
Every "Learn More" button on the homepage goes to Google Cloud :/
skewart 10y ago
I'm always intrigued by any new development in the "serverless" space, but this website seems pretty undercooked and at the moment it doesn't do a good job of explaining what the heck OpenLambda actually is. After a lot of poking around I read through the linked slides and discovered that OpenLambda aims to let anyone run their own lambda engine - i.e. run AWS Lambda on your local machine. The goal seems to be to let anyone research and innovate on serverless architectures, instead of just waiting to see what Amazon, Google, or Microsoft release. It doesn't really seem to be intended for production use, more just R&D. It also seems to be a student/educational project (?) The "onboarding" meeting slides (found under the "Development" tab) give a decent overview of what the project is all about - http://www.open-lambda.org/resources/slides/ol-first-meeting.pdf http://www.open-lambda.org/resources/slides/ol-first-meeting...
crudbug 10y ago
IBM is also doing opensource work [0] on this. [0] https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk
marknadal 10y ago
Lambda is great but it is not serverless, but more a PaaS for microservices. Which is a great direction to head, but not the correct vocabulary. "Serverless" can more accurately be said of the P2P/decentralized movement: - https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ - http://gun.js.org/ http://gun.js.org/ - https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/ - https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/ etc.
- mcdevhammer 10y ago
  Actually "serverless" in the sense of the current buzz word is not P2P, it is basically Lambda: http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html
DevKoala 10y ago
How does it compare to Apex? Anybody with experience on both? https://github.com/apex/apex https://github.com/apex/apex PS: Besides the fact APEX is only for AWS, however, APEX is very mature.
- adjohn 10y ago
  Apex is a framework used to help build and deploy applications on Lambda. This project appears to be a way to run your own Lambda service locally. There are other projects out there like OpenWhisk[1], Iron Worker[2], Gestalt[3], and Funktion[4]. [1] - https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk [2] - https://www.iron.io/platform/ironworker/ https://www.iron.io/platform/ironworker/ [3] - https://galacticfog.github.io/ https://galacticfog.github.io/ [4] - https://github.com/fabric8io/funktion https://github.com/fabric8io/funktion (Edited for Formatting)
mandliya 10y ago
Link to Azure function points to google cloud platform!
jmspring 10y ago
Is it me or is each link under the various providers routing to Google Cloud Functions -- https://cloud.google.com/functions/ https://cloud.google.com/functions/
X86BSD 10y ago
If I hear "serverless" one more time I swear I'm going to shiv a bi78ch.
- CodingInfra 10y ago
  Me too! I was happy to see Werner Vogels echo this as well, along with soliciting a better term on twitter.
- warmwaffles 10y ago
  Same thing with "cloud" or "webscale" it's all marketing bullshit.
  - philliphaydon 10y ago
    Time sharing?
    - warmwaffles 10y ago
      it's free real-estate
  - X86BSD 10y ago
    Preach it brother!
Mizza 10y ago
Author of Zappa[0] here - glad to see more F/OSS implementations in this space - see also OpenWhisk and I think there was another (IronIO? MetalIO? Something like that?) - but I think an important piece that's missing is a F/OSS implementation of API Gateway! That's part of the reason the AWS is still the leader of the pack IMO. [0] https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa
- davidpatrick 10y ago
  Something I recently stumbled upon through a coding challenge was https://webtask.io/ https://webtask.io/ Having used ApiGateway + AWSLambda + AWSCloudwatch, I found Webtask to be infinitey easier to use and deploy. The only downside of Webtask, for some users, is that it is all Javascript, where AWSLambda allows multiple languages.
partycoder 10y ago
I think serverless is a very misleading name, because it does still need server infrastructure and server software. The serverless term will confuse non-technical people to think there's actually no server infrastructure or software needed.
- lostcolony 10y ago
  Well, as you posted this after another post that addressed this criticism rather elegantly, I will repeat the relevant bit - " We're OK with 'wireless' access to Internet, although it's pretty clear that the packets will hit a wire at some point. Wireless means I'm not pulling a cord along with my phone. " Non-technical people may assume no server infrastructure. From the developer perspective -this is accurate-; the actual hardware is handled by someone else, there is no concept of it that the developer has to work around. I'm not sure why you'd think someone would believe no software would be needed; even when servers are involved, there is software located elsewhere, on a mobile phone or a web browser or similar. No one is going to say "Oh, serverless? Then I don't need my software development team any more!"
  - faleidel 10y ago
    The problem with serverless is that it's seems to mean distributed. So why not chose a more fitting name?
    - lostcolony 10y ago
      Like? The point of it is there are no servers to manage. That's the sell, that's the differentiator. Hence the name. But by all means, if you have a better term for it I'd love to hear it.
      - lqdc13 10y ago
        Well thing is you ARE indirectly managing server resources. For example, you have to deal with "autoscaling" or else it can run out of control. Why not say "fully-managed" or "serverside fully-managed"? In serverless, everyone is a "client" and you run things client-side. Things like P2P file sharing in the browser is serverless. Things like AWS lambda obviously have a server.
mrmondo 10y ago
So there's no servers, anywhere in this? You don't run it on a computer or anything? Clearly I'm being a smart ass, but pointing out that 'serverless' is an idiotic marketing term.
- faleidel 10y ago
  What we need is to find a term to replace that atrocity. We agree that this is not "server less" but what is it? Its more like abstract servers.
- dang 10y ago
  We've all got these peeves; the one that gets me is 'isomorphic'. But language evolves one annoying incorrectness at a time, and it's tedious and off-topic to vent about this every single time it comes up. (I'm not saying that to you personally but in response to all these subthreads.)
  - kowdermeister 10y ago
    Sure, but it's fundamentally wrong. The only upside is that it's catchy. It's tiresome to point it out from time to time but if I go to a bar and each time I say Jeronimo and each time I get slapped and explained that they don't like it that there, after a while I'll stop and just ask for a beer like normal people do :)
    - dang 10y ago
      I doubt that that model applies here.
- inopinatus 10y ago
  Indeed there may not be. You do not require server-grade hardware to build a function-as-a-service platform. Moreover you do not need a client-server endpoint. If you do have either of those things, it's an implementation detail. Case in point, AWS Lambda was launched without one of them. If you have a better suggestion for a catchy name for function-as-a-service, the world of tech marketing awaits you.
kasajian 10y ago
HyperDev
smb06 10y ago
I think i heard this at DockerCon earlier this year: "There is no such thing as 'serverless'. It's just someone else's problem"
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sbarski 10y ago
Interesting. Will keep an eye on this. And for all those who disagree with "Serverless", come to Serverlessconf London (london.serverlessconf.io) and we can debate it there. In fact, would love to see everyone there!
- spriggan3 10y ago
  > And for all those who disagree with "Serverless", come to Serverlessconf London (london.serverlessconf.io) and we can debate it there. In fact, would love to see everyone there! Nobody disagree with anything but the marketing. "Serveless" is just an inaccurate description of what is actually going on. There is a server otherwise how do you communicate with the outside world? You need an API gateway to your pubsub architecture. Thus calling it "serverless" is misleading. Look we all know, buzzwords and marketing are here to sell, but when marketing is misleading it actually hurts the whole profession, leading to bad choices.
  - sbarski 10y ago
    I am sure people have said this but it's "serverless" from the perspective of the user (who is a developer in this case). The developer doesn't have to deal with servers/infrastructure so for them the system is serverless. I guess it's like wireless... Something could be wireless from the perspective of the end user but there are still wires actually there. I honestly think that serverless is a lot less ambiguous and misleading than something like "cloud" which is completely abstract.
    - spriggan3 10y ago
      > I guess it's like wireless... Something could be wireless from the perspective of the end user but there are still wires actually there. It's a bad analogy. As a developer you are supposed to know they are wires somewhere. That's why all this marketing is dangerous. the obfuscation which makes everything sound like "voodoo and black magic". > The developer doesn't have to deal with servers/infrastructure so for them the system is serverless. Yes he does, he has to configure and manage the whole thing on Amazon dashboard. Sure he doesn't have to spin upcontainers, but autoscaling doesn't make something "serverless". And again, you need API gateway to communicate with the outside world. So there is still a server fronting the whole thing.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pmontra 10y ago
So, after having read the PDF I eventually realized that this is not a tool to cross develop and deploy to the three lambda clouds, but to self host your lambdas on your servers. It's interesting and I might use it but I suggest to make it very clear on the home page of the project. The way it's designed now tells more about AWS, ECS and Azure than about the project itself.
thedonkeycometh 10y ago
All the reference links for cloud functions go to Google. Half life 3 confirmed.
AJRF 10y ago
For me when I click for the AWS Lambda example it takes me to Google Cloud
cagataygurturk 10y ago
I already counted 5 smart people saying in "serverless" there are already "servers". You are very intelligent and reminding me those guys who repeatedly said "there is definitely a string over there dude" while we were watching David Copperfield's show together.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

167 points by guifortaine 10y ago

Sleaker 10y ago

'Serverless' heh... oh man marketing is great. Just like if you have it in the cloud it's 'hardwareless' right?

bowmessage 10y ago
Have you checked out my codeless github package?
adzicg 10y ago
I don't mind this name. We're OK with 'wireless' access to Internet, although it's pretty clear that the packets will hit a wire at some point. Wireless means I'm not pulling a cord along with my phone. 'serverless' similarly means my code is not listening on a socket, although the request does come from some socket, of course
- niftich 10y ago
  Your 'wireless' analogy is the most convincing explanation I've heard for the term yet. When I was struggling with accepting 'serverless' as a legitimate name for Function-calls-as-a-Service, I reminded myself that there's no server to SFTP or SSH into to muck about on its filesystem.
  - kowdermeister 10y ago
    Wireless is a wrong analogy. Wireless refers to the lack of cables _between_ my device and the router. "Serverless" things however are part of the same infrastructure that serve other web services. They are sitting on servers. Computers which has a CPU to execute the functions. We call them servers, therefore serverless is meaningless term. > there's no server to SFTP or SSH into There is, but you are not allowed in.
- spriggan3 10y ago
  "Serverless" is a stupid expression. There is still a server, otherwise how do you call your functions from outside ? The most accurate description of "functions as service" is a simple pub sub architecture, some service listens to events, starts a container and execute some script/binary/whatever. In order to send events to the former service, you need a server anyway. Just because it's a different service doesn't make the stack "serverless". Whether it is on Amazon or Azure, you're still paying for the API gateway service. Here is your server. We are at a point where some dubious marketing hurts development, because that marketing is completely inaccurate and misleading. Every single developer which engages into that misleading marketing should be called out publicly for his bullshit.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

niftich 10y ago

Intriguing venture. I have some feedback, please forgive the terseness: [1] Documentation: too dense, starts off with running a shell script, but it's not immediately clear it's a quickstart, or to set up a dev environment, or what's going on. At least have an intro, or a table of contents, or something. [2] Speaking of documentation, I'm unclear where your product stands. Is it a 'build your own Lambda-as-a-Service provider', or some kind of meta-proxy-orchestrator that abstracts away from the actual LaaS provider? (if it's not the latter, why link to every commercial LaaS offering? Aren't they competitors?) [3] Our Team: "coming soon". I sympathize with having a lot to do on a website, but I care about your credentials if I am to run some code. Or maybe I don't, since lots of projects are popular on github and you don't necessarily know all of their authors in detail. But if you don't have it yet, don't highlight it in your menu. [4] Your github is barebones and links back to the aforementioned docs page. It's a bit like running in circles. Have a short readme on github, then you can link somewhere else! [5] On the front page, all 'learn more' buttons go to the same place. But, why have these at all? (see, #2. maybe move these into a 'Why' page that explains your pitch and how LaaS is big and these are the big players that are also doing it) [6] Edit: the slides are good and they help me understand what's going on.

lostcolony 10y ago
After staring at it a long while, and clicking a bunch of things, I assume it -must- be a build your own Lambda-as-a-Service. Otherwise, the steps to spin up a load balancer and Docker images make no sense at all. But it certainly isn't clear.

blorgle 10y ago

If you're going to build serverless thing to take advantage of market hype why not at least try and build one that has data locality like ZeroVM/ZeroCloud (http://www.zerovm.org/zerocloud.html http://www.zerovm.org/zerocloud.html) and Manta (https://www.joyent.com/manta https://www.joyent.com/manta)?

nl 10y ago
Have you tried ZeroVM? It isn't exactly a simple thing. I looked at it and got some stuff working in it a while ago, and it certainly limits what you can do.

kefka 10y ago

Yeah. I had a similar idea of a system of distributed serverless computing. Much to the chagrin of certain users who badmouth, it has much more to do with distributing computation on any machine. My idea was to run a cluster of Erlang nodes, connect them by Tor Hidden Services. Each machine would have 2 HSdirs, one for the unique name for that node, and a shared HSdir that will randomly talk/load balance via a DNS-like mechanism. The backend storage substrate would be IPFS. A user would write their program and add it to IPFS. My cluster would have /ipfs and /ipns mounted, and could run erlang programs and functions directly from that. That was my idea thus far. Obviously, choosing Erlang would be rather erudite and exclusive to a small subset of programmers... But its tools of distributed actors and much of the hard stuff done for you just seemed like a shoe-in.

tleunen 10y ago

Every "Learn More" button on the homepage goes to Google Cloud :/

skewart 10y ago

I'm always intrigued by any new development in the "serverless" space, but this website seems pretty undercooked and at the moment it doesn't do a good job of explaining what the heck OpenLambda actually is. After a lot of poking around I read through the linked slides and discovered that OpenLambda aims to let anyone run their own lambda engine - i.e. run AWS Lambda on your local machine. The goal seems to be to let anyone research and innovate on serverless architectures, instead of just waiting to see what Amazon, Google, or Microsoft release. It doesn't really seem to be intended for production use, more just R&D. It also seems to be a student/educational project (?) The "onboarding" meeting slides (found under the "Development" tab) give a decent overview of what the project is all about - http://www.open-lambda.org/resources/slides/ol-first-meeting.pdf http://www.open-lambda.org/resources/slides/ol-first-meeting...

crudbug 10y ago

IBM is also doing opensource work [0] on this. [0] https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk

marknadal 10y ago

Lambda is great but it is not serverless, but more a PaaS for microservices. Which is a great direction to head, but not the correct vocabulary. "Serverless" can more accurately be said of the P2P/decentralized movement: - https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ - http://gun.js.org/ http://gun.js.org/ - https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/ - https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/ etc.

mcdevhammer 10y ago
Actually "serverless" in the sense of the current buzz word is not P2P, it is basically Lambda: http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html

DevKoala 10y ago

How does it compare to Apex? Anybody with experience on both? https://github.com/apex/apex https://github.com/apex/apex PS: Besides the fact APEX is only for AWS, however, APEX is very mature.

adjohn 10y ago
Apex is a framework used to help build and deploy applications on Lambda. This project appears to be a way to run your own Lambda service locally. There are other projects out there like OpenWhisk[1], Iron Worker[2], Gestalt[3], and Funktion[4]. [1] - https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk https://github.com/openwhisk/openwhisk [2] - https://www.iron.io/platform/ironworker/ https://www.iron.io/platform/ironworker/ [3] - https://galacticfog.github.io/ https://galacticfog.github.io/ [4] - https://github.com/fabric8io/funktion https://github.com/fabric8io/funktion (Edited for Formatting)

mandliya 10y ago

Link to Azure function points to google cloud platform!

jmspring 10y ago

Is it me or is each link under the various providers routing to Google Cloud Functions -- https://cloud.google.com/functions/ https://cloud.google.com/functions/

X86BSD 10y ago

If I hear "serverless" one more time I swear I'm going to shiv a bi78ch.

CodingInfra 10y ago
Me too! I was happy to see Werner Vogels echo this as well, along with soliciting a better term on twitter.
warmwaffles 10y ago
Same thing with "cloud" or "webscale" it's all marketing bullshit.
- philliphaydon 10y ago
  Time sharing?
  - warmwaffles 10y ago
    it's free real-estate
- X86BSD 10y ago
  Preach it brother!

Mizza 10y ago

Author of Zappa[0] here - glad to see more F/OSS implementations in this space - see also OpenWhisk and I think there was another (IronIO? MetalIO? Something like that?) - but I think an important piece that's missing is a F/OSS implementation of API Gateway! That's part of the reason the AWS is still the leader of the pack IMO. [0] https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa

davidpatrick 10y ago
Something I recently stumbled upon through a coding challenge was https://webtask.io/ https://webtask.io/ Having used ApiGateway + AWSLambda + AWSCloudwatch, I found Webtask to be infinitey easier to use and deploy. The only downside of Webtask, for some users, is that it is all Javascript, where AWSLambda allows multiple languages.

partycoder 10y ago

I think serverless is a very misleading name, because it does still need server infrastructure and server software. The serverless term will confuse non-technical people to think there's actually no server infrastructure or software needed.

lostcolony 10y ago
Well, as you posted this after another post that addressed this criticism rather elegantly, I will repeat the relevant bit - " We're OK with 'wireless' access to Internet, although it's pretty clear that the packets will hit a wire at some point. Wireless means I'm not pulling a cord along with my phone. " Non-technical people may assume no server infrastructure. From the developer perspective -this is accurate-; the actual hardware is handled by someone else, there is no concept of it that the developer has to work around. I'm not sure why you'd think someone would believe no software would be needed; even when servers are involved, there is software located elsewhere, on a mobile phone or a web browser or similar. No one is going to say "Oh, serverless? Then I don't need my software development team any more!"
- faleidel 10y ago
  The problem with serverless is that it's seems to mean distributed. So why not chose a more fitting name?
  - lostcolony 10y ago
    Like? The point of it is there are no servers to manage. That's the sell, that's the differentiator. Hence the name. But by all means, if you have a better term for it I'd love to hear it.
    - lqdc13 10y ago
      Well thing is you ARE indirectly managing server resources. For example, you have to deal with "autoscaling" or else it can run out of control. Why not say "fully-managed" or "serverside fully-managed"? In serverless, everyone is a "client" and you run things client-side. Things like P2P file sharing in the browser is serverless. Things like AWS lambda obviously have a server.

mrmondo 10y ago

So there's no servers, anywhere in this? You don't run it on a computer or anything? Clearly I'm being a smart ass, but pointing out that 'serverless' is an idiotic marketing term.

faleidel 10y ago
What we need is to find a term to replace that atrocity. We agree that this is not "server less" but what is it? Its more like abstract servers.
dang 10y ago
We've all got these peeves; the one that gets me is 'isomorphic'. But language evolves one annoying incorrectness at a time, and it's tedious and off-topic to vent about this every single time it comes up. (I'm not saying that to you personally but in response to all these subthreads.)
- kowdermeister 10y ago
  Sure, but it's fundamentally wrong. The only upside is that it's catchy. It's tiresome to point it out from time to time but if I go to a bar and each time I say Jeronimo and each time I get slapped and explained that they don't like it that there, after a while I'll stop and just ask for a beer like normal people do :)
  - dang 10y ago
    I doubt that that model applies here.
inopinatus 10y ago
Indeed there may not be. You do not require server-grade hardware to build a function-as-a-service platform. Moreover you do not need a client-server endpoint. If you do have either of those things, it's an implementation detail. Case in point, AWS Lambda was launched without one of them. If you have a better suggestion for a catchy name for function-as-a-service, the world of tech marketing awaits you.

kasajian 10y ago

HyperDev

smb06 10y ago

I think i heard this at DockerCon earlier this year: "There is no such thing as 'serverless'. It's just someone else's problem"

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sbarski 10y ago

Interesting. Will keep an eye on this. And for all those who disagree with "Serverless", come to Serverlessconf London (london.serverlessconf.io) and we can debate it there. In fact, would love to see everyone there!

spriggan3 10y ago
> And for all those who disagree with "Serverless", come to Serverlessconf London (london.serverlessconf.io) and we can debate it there. In fact, would love to see everyone there! Nobody disagree with anything but the marketing. "Serveless" is just an inaccurate description of what is actually going on. There is a server otherwise how do you communicate with the outside world? You need an API gateway to your pubsub architecture. Thus calling it "serverless" is misleading. Look we all know, buzzwords and marketing are here to sell, but when marketing is misleading it actually hurts the whole profession, leading to bad choices.
- sbarski 10y ago
  I am sure people have said this but it's "serverless" from the perspective of the user (who is a developer in this case). The developer doesn't have to deal with servers/infrastructure so for them the system is serverless. I guess it's like wireless... Something could be wireless from the perspective of the end user but there are still wires actually there. I honestly think that serverless is a lot less ambiguous and misleading than something like "cloud" which is completely abstract.
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    > I guess it's like wireless... Something could be wireless from the perspective of the end user but there are still wires actually there. It's a bad analogy. As a developer you are supposed to know they are wires somewhere. That's why all this marketing is dangerous. the obfuscation which makes everything sound like "voodoo and black magic". > The developer doesn't have to deal with servers/infrastructure so for them the system is serverless. Yes he does, he has to configure and manage the whole thing on Amazon dashboard. Sure he doesn't have to spin upcontainers, but autoscaling doesn't make something "serverless". And again, you need API gateway to communicate with the outside world. So there is still a server fronting the whole thing.

deleted 10y ago

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pmontra 10y ago

So, after having read the PDF I eventually realized that this is not a tool to cross develop and deploy to the three lambda clouds, but to self host your lambdas on your servers. It's interesting and I might use it but I suggest to make it very clear on the home page of the project. The way it's designed now tells more about AWS, ECS and Azure than about the project itself.

thedonkeycometh 10y ago

All the reference links for cloud functions go to Google. Half life 3 confirmed.

AJRF 10y ago

For me when I click for the AWS Lambda example it takes me to Google Cloud

cagataygurturk 10y ago

I already counted 5 smart people saying in "serverless" there are already "servers". You are very intelligent and reminding me those guys who repeatedly said "there is definitely a string over there dude" while we were watching David Copperfield's show together.

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