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This looks like a worthy competitor to AWS Lambda, but I'm disappointed by the unalterable limit of 400 concurrent invocations of a function. (The "Quotas" page
by keithwinstein 10y ago
This looks like a worthy competitor to AWS Lambda, but I'm disappointed by the unalterable limit of 400 concurrent invocations of a function. (The "Quotas" page says "Max concurrent functions" is 400, with "Can be increased" as "No." https://cloud.google.com/functions/quotas https://cloud.google.com/functions/quotas)
One of the cool things about AWS Lambda is that you can use it as a short-term supercomputer with thousands of threads. We (Stanford/UCSD ExCamera) are using AWS Lambda to do massively parallel low-latency video encoding with 4,000+ concurrent threads. Our colleagues at U.C. Berkeley who built PyWren are doing machine learning on Lambda with similar numbers of threads. AWS has been encouraging to us for these kind of workloads, even if they aren't what Amazon initially envisioned.
So a hard limit of 400 (that can't be increased) would be a real bummer. I wonder if we can get around this by defining 20 identical functions and then invoking each one 400 times in parallel...
- inlined 10y agoIf you need more than 400 concurrent invocations please reach out to support (not promising whether or not we'll be able to satisfy arbitrary scale just yet). We're on day one of a Beta product and it'll keep getting better.
- phpencil 10y agoAnd just to clarify, Cloud Functions for Firebase is covered under the Firebase free support, who you can reach here: https://firebase.google.com/support/contact/troubleshooting/ https://firebase.google.com/support/contact/troubleshooting/
- dorianm 10y ago"You have 5 questions remaining" Limit is 5 per year, that's brutal
- ealexhudson 10y agoThe support comes from a genii. Make sure not to ask "Is the limit really 5?" with your first question.
- joshschreuder 10y agoJust ask for an infinite number of support questions
- CamelCaseName 10y agoSupport: No. 4 questions remaining
- brillyfresh 10y agoWhat is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
- phpencil 10y ago5 troubleshooting, unlimited bugs and feature requests -> https://firebase.google.com/support/contact/bugs-features/ https://firebase.google.com/support/contact/bugs-features/ there. We're on Stack Overflow/the firebase-talk google group/slack etc. as well for general questions of course!
- dorianm 10y agoNice, maybe the helper text could be improved then?
- pier25 10y agoCan confirm. The Firebase team is monitoring StackOverflow constantly. I've had answers in as short as a few minutes.
- lacker 10y agoOoh, I like that phrase for the front line of triage. "Is this troubleshooting, a bug report, or a feature request?" I kind of wish GitHub issues separated things that way, too.
- metaphyze 10y agoAnother disappointing limitation is being restricted to Node.js. AWS Lambda lets you write your code in Node.js, Python, Java, or C#. This is particularly useful for tuning your Lambdas based on their expected usage. If you have a Lambda that is being constantly invoked, it might be better to write it in Java. It has a longer start up time but has better performance after the initial startup. However, if your Lambda is invoked infrequently (and thus is frequently shutdown from inactivity), it would better to write it in Node.js or Python to take advantage of the snappier start up time.
- alphabettsy 10y agoAgreed. I still hate JS
- mbrock 10y agoFor the record, you can also write Lambda programs in C, Haskell, Rust, Ocaml, Go, or basically whatever compiled language you want, as long as you can manage to produce a binary whose dynamically linked library paths are compatible with Amazon Linux, which is quite easily done either by building on EC2 or using a Docker image with the Amazon Linux file system --- or building static binaries.
- mbleigh 10y agoFirebase engineer here. Additional languages will come, but we're starting with Node.js. We'd rather take the approach of doing one language really well than a bunch of languages with a poor developer experience.
- rationalthug 10y agoHow does Cloud Functions for Firebase handle node modules with native code add-ons?
- inlined 10y agoImage magick's binaries are already installed on the image. Any native binary node module that has a preinstall script should work too. If you hit an unsupported syscall error, contact firebase support at firebase.google.com/contact/troubleshooting and we'll triage.
- fiatjaf 10y agoReally, which percentage of clients will need more than that?
- lotyrin 10y agoAny service with more than 400 users that want to run a batch process for each user in constant time with respect to number of users.
- fiatjaf 10y agoRight, how many of those do exist with an internal architecture that will fit the Lambda model?
- ruleabidinguser 10y agoI'm curious more generally why would somebody use Lambda at all? Surely its far more expensive than running on your own servers (or instances), no?
- ceejayoz 10y agoLambda's billed in 100 millisecond increments. EC2 servers are billed in one hour increments. If you need short tasks that run in bursty workloads, Lambda's (potentially) a no-brainer.
- imtringued 10y agoFirebase users don't want to run their own servers.
- inlined 10y agoWouldn't this still require linear time to scan a database and map users to work?
- brutuscat 10y agoBTW AWS Lambda do have concurrent execution[1] limits which by default seems to be set to 100 per region[2] [1]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/concurrent-executions.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/concurrent-exec... [2]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html#limits-list https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html#lim...