5 ms·

Serverless Architectures

57 points by banderon 10y ago

ryanburk 10y ago
re: scale and on demand: "you only pay for the compute that you need, down to a 100ms boundary in the case of AWS Lambda" it will be interesting to see how small these boundaries can become before it is too expensive to measure at the level of granularity sought. when you can spin up a container, run job, and destroy faster than you can even log.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  A Java app that uses 1 GB of ram still uses 1 GB of ram. Either you pay to idle 1 GB of ram on some giant server somewhere, or you put it on really fast SSD and pay the time to load it all into ram. Now a little Python or C routine that uses 8 MB of ram... becomes a much easier thing to do.
nzoschke 10y ago
Fanstatic article, that gets the subtleties correct. This is my favorite part: > If we see the gap of management and scaling between Serverless FaaS and hosted containers narrow the choice between them may just come down to style, and type of application. For example it may be that FaaS is seen as a better choice for event driven style with few event types per application component, and containers are seen as a better choice for synchronous-request driven components with many entry points. I expect in 5 years time that many applications and teams will use both architectural approaches, and it will be fascinating to see patterns of such use emerge. We will see this gap narrow. I'm running tons of ECS workloads and operating the servers takes no effort. Amazon releases AMIs, CloudFormation automates AMI updates and scale, and ASGs keep everything running. It took effort to learn these techniques and build tools that use them, but that's solved by open source software. See Convox for an OSS project that sets it all up out of the box: https://github.com/convox/rack https://github.com/convox/rack. Disclaimer: I work on Convox full time. > containers are seen as a better choice for synchronous-request driven components with many entry points Is absolutely correct, and describes ~95% of real-world software. For greenfield on AWS, I'd definitely see if Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB will work. For all those "old" Java, Python, PHP and Postgres systems out there, we have to run traditional containers, and load balancers and databases. There's really no future where we are all "serverless". But there is a future where the resource cost and operational burden of both Containers and Functions is very very low.
gavinpc 10y ago
Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208 And the day before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913463 And the day before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11910246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11910246
- buckbova 10y ago
  FYI, article does get updated regularly. But, last update: 04 August 2016: Added “Future” and “Conclusion”
aikah 10y ago
Still can't stand that ridiculous buzzword. Fortunately with the moniker like that no professional will take that trend seriously..

57 points by banderon 10y ago

re: scale and on demand: "you only pay for the compute that you need, down to a 100ms boundary in the case of AWS Lambda" it will be interesting to see how small these boundaries can become before it is too expensive to measure at the level of granularity sought. when you can spin up a container, run job, and destroy faster than you can even log.

brianwawok 10y ago
A Java app that uses 1 GB of ram still uses 1 GB of ram. Either you pay to idle 1 GB of ram on some giant server somewhere, or you put it on really fast SSD and pay the time to load it all into ram. Now a little Python or C routine that uses 8 MB of ram... becomes a much easier thing to do.

nzoschke 10y ago

Fanstatic article, that gets the subtleties correct. This is my favorite part: > If we see the gap of management and scaling between Serverless FaaS and hosted containers narrow the choice between them may just come down to style, and type of application. For example it may be that FaaS is seen as a better choice for event driven style with few event types per application component, and containers are seen as a better choice for synchronous-request driven components with many entry points. I expect in 5 years time that many applications and teams will use both architectural approaches, and it will be fascinating to see patterns of such use emerge. We will see this gap narrow. I'm running tons of ECS workloads and operating the servers takes no effort. Amazon releases AMIs, CloudFormation automates AMI updates and scale, and ASGs keep everything running. It took effort to learn these techniques and build tools that use them, but that's solved by open source software. See Convox for an OSS project that sets it all up out of the box: https://github.com/convox/rack https://github.com/convox/rack. Disclaimer: I work on Convox full time. > containers are seen as a better choice for synchronous-request driven components with many entry points Is absolutely correct, and describes ~95% of real-world software. For greenfield on AWS, I'd definitely see if Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB will work. For all those "old" Java, Python, PHP and Postgres systems out there, we have to run traditional containers, and load balancers and databases. There's really no future where we are all "serverless". But there is a future where the resource cost and operational burden of both Containers and Functions is very very low.

gavinpc 10y ago

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208 And the day before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913463 And the day before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11910246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11910246

buckbova 10y ago
FYI, article does get updated regularly. But, last update: 04 August 2016: Added “Future” and “Conclusion”

aikah 10y ago

Still can't stand that ridiculous buzzword. Fortunately with the moniker like that no professional will take that trend seriously..