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AWS Serverless React Native Starter App
- GrumpyNl 9y agoThat's a great resource, detailed step by step instructions. This will get you started.
- polskibus 9y agoIt would be great if they also included a pricing calculator/model for all those AWS things tied up together. If cloud providers want to be seen like utility providers, they need to provide a simple pricing model analogous to Watt and kWh in electricity for users to be able to estimate costs easily.
- kuschku 9y agoThat’d go directly against their business interests. It’s in Amazon’s interest to make it as confusing as possible, so you never notice you spend orders of magnitudes more than you’d have to.
- ceejayoz 9y agoI really don't think it's in Amazon's interests to have a "holy shit, what happened?" reaction when you open your credit card bill.
- actionscripted 9y agoAnd if you do -- say you forgot to kill some mega-cluster you were experimenting with and it ran for a few days before you terminated it -- they'll usually just drop the charge.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoI've been using most of these services since they launched and I can say that as a whole they are significantly cheaper to both run and develop until you get to very large scale at which point the code transfers to real servers pretty easily. I have several mobile apps that I run literaly free because the Lambda usage is under the free tier and those I don't cost dollars a month. I am very happy with it in general. There is of course the problem with any instant scaling metered service that if you are actively attacked you can rack up a large bill but there are monitoring systems that can be used to prevent that if you want (at the cost of taking down the service) or allow it to scale (at the cost of $$ but your customers stay happy). Edit: It is worth noting (based on discussion below) that other posters are right. It is not for everyone. It has some major tradeoffs that you need to be aware of and plan around. But if the tradeoffs are OK (and I personally found they are for many of my projects) it is a great service.
- polskibus 9y agoI'm curious, what do those apps do? Surely they need a database behind the severless layer? If so, is the database also on some kind of free tier? I'm mostly interested in TCO kind of calculators for cloud computing, not calculators on a per service-type basis.
- joecot 9y agoDynamoDB, which is Amazon's serverless NoSQL database offering. If your service takes off, it's also the guaranteed source of a serious amount of cash for the company. If you get big while on DynamoDB, 1) it's near impossible to restructure to optimize your tables, 2) it's near impossible to migrate off of without serious pain, 3) your only method of controlling performance is sliding read/write throughput meters for your tables (ie, paying them more money). DynamoDB is not a service I'd be comfortable locking into. Use DynamoDB if you are absolutely sure your database structure is perfectly optimized from the get go for the traffic you're going to receive. Your indexes and structure have to be absolutely perfect starting, because there's no good way to fix them later.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoI value your opinion but I have had a very different experience. 1. I agree. First few attempts at DynamoDB tables were a disaster. But once you get used to them you don't have to change schemas and then it is not an issue. Note, you can add and indexes, just not the primary one. 2. Not so. It's not easy but it's far from impossible or painful. I've had my fair share of pain migrating SQL databases too. ... Export to S3 ... Grab the S3 backup and write an ETL to format and load it ... Put in place a stream hook to keep your newly loaded database up to date ... Switch over your data abstraction / model layer (you did use one of those right?) 3. You can also choose your indexes wisely. How is this different than a normal database? Most of my DynamoDB using apps I run for 100% free and I've scaled to hundreds of thousands of users for less than the cost of a small Postgres server. Just keep a model layer between you and Dynamo to avoid vendor lockin and you'll be fine.
- throwaway2016a 9y ago
- querulous 9y agoin my experience aws are incredibly proactive about helping customers understand their costs and offering suggestions to save money. they regularly send me cost benefit analysis of using reserved instances, for example
- nolite 9y agoHi, I'm thinking about working on a solution to better understand and limit costs in AWS. Could I contact you to understand a bit more about what would be an ideal setup for you?
- polskibus 9y agoI'm not a big user myself. However, what I think is missing is a tool where you map your data flows, choose the flow steps as Amazon services, get required parameters back, fill them in, get back estimated cost.
- dingdingdang 9y agoI'm sure this is a great resource, only "Serverless" is really the worst possible tag to put on something requires a server per definition. I mean, Zeronet or anything else truly distributed, OK, but not for something that's simply characterized by running on a formalized serverbase like AWS.
- bigtunacan 9y agoWhile not really accurate, "Serverless computing" is the accepted industry standard term for this model where server management is abstracted away with cloud-based services. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing
- mrmondo 9y agoI would argue that it’s not an industry standard unless it’s back by some sort of ISO like RFC. I’d also argue that it’s not an accepted term as _many_ people don’t agree with its misleading name, for example I personally see it as marketing spin.
- ceejayoz 9y agoNext you'll tell me "cloud" computing doesn't happen inside a bunch of water vapor.
- chc 9y agoThe thing here is that they're not using any of AWS's proper server offerings. There's no EC2 or Lightsail or even RDS. There is no thing or concrete group of things that you can point to and say, "There, those are my servers." It's based off API Gateway, S3 and Lambda, none of which is recognizable as a server in the traditional sense (though of course there are servers behind the scenes implementing the abstraction).
- notaboutdave 9y agoAs a developer or startup the last thing you want to do is tie yourself into absurdly proprietary platforms like this. Giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google are buying up all established competition, but now they want control of your stuff before you even make it. Also, user "nslog" only posts Amazon stuff and never comments.
- 40acres 9y agoOnce you reach a certain size I think it makes sense to explore rolling your own infrastructure but for an MVP or early stage startup not having to worry about infrastructure has got to be a god send. I recall hearing Kevin Systrom (Instagram) talk about how the app kept crashing on launch while it was being hosted on his single laptop. Imagine if he had EC2 :) (not that they needed it to grow)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sbov 9y agoI think the problem is more serverless architectures than EC2. If you build for EC2 you can probably fairly easily migrate between hosts (at least, for our codebase it is). But if you build for Amazon Lambda there's more vendor lock in.
- monkmartinez 9y agoHow so? My Python Lambda functions have almost zero AWS boilerplate besides passing in the event and context to the function whether I use it or not. I would argue that real infrastructure or vendor "lock in" is due to the friction of learning the API's associated with each cloud platform. Obviously, one can choose to use all the services of the cloud platform they will deploy to. However, and in most cases, that is not a strict requirement to use the cloud platform to begin with. "Lock in" seems more like a self-created problem than anything.
- 9y ago
- andrewstuart 9y agoI've built a couple of complete SAAS applications on an AWS stack pretty similar to this and I can say that I've been incredibly productive. The one technology I particularly like is Cognito/UserPools for user management - I never want to write Yet Another User Management System again. I'd never use DynamoDB though - it's never made sense to me. * AWS Userpools * AWS Cognito * AWS S3 Simple Storage Service * AWS EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud * AWS SQS Simple Queue Service * AWS CloudFront * AWS CloudWatch * AWS KMS Key Management Service * AWS Certificate Management Service * AWS Route53 * AWS Lambda * Postgres/SQL * Python 3.6 * ReactJS/ES2015
- johnhenry 9y agoIs there a YAUMS beta coming soon?
- andrewstuart 9y agoWhat is YAUMS?
- ineptech 9y ago> ...Yet Another User Management System...
- andrewstuart 9y agoOH sorry. That's what AWS Cognito with AWS Userpools is - a user management system. When I say that I never want to write YAUMS again, I mean that Cognito and USerpools frees me from ever having to do that task again.
- johnhenry 9y agoSorry. Bad joke :/
- wahnfrieden 9y agoOne big reason to use DynamoDB with Lambda is to avoid the VPC penalty (~10-20 second cold starts to attach ENI) in Lambda necessary to use RDS securely. DynamoDB can be used without security groups and still use IAM-based access to lock it down securely. With RDS, you need to use security groups to properly secure your DB, which requires VPC for Lambda. DynamoDB has world-class horizontal scalability but certainly comes with a high architecture integration cost, depending on your use cases.
- bernadus_edwin 9y agoStarter app always good. I hope more example on starter kit cloud mbaas, for ex: firebase and azure. Need example include push sample code. Simple thing make faster building mvp
- jijji 9y agoIt seems like a marketing pitch for Amazon Web Services.
- ChicagoBoy11 9y agoAs a mostly hobbyist developer, I've always had such a hard time with AWS. I've tried Serverless a couple of times, but I couldn't for the life of me really understand Amazon's billing structure. For instance, while AWS Lambda supposedly has a generous free tier for the function execution, by the time you add the rest of the infrastructure to call the function over http, you start incurring fees. Mind you, they are incredibly modest, but its hard to really pull the trigger and commit without having a lot of confidence over exactly where those fees are coming from and how to confidently stop it/put caps on it. I fully acknowledge that there are resources or options that I could be totally missing. If there is anyone who has gone through this sort of thing and has successfully managed to get really transparent look at pricing and reliably and easily shut down/provision/cap AWS services, do let me know!
- moduspwnens14 9y agoPersonally, I've had the opposite experience. You can set billing alerts that will e-mail you when you cross whatever thresholds you set. On the billing page, it has a line item for each thing that costs money. It's not particularly difficult to stop anything, especially when you're just doing hobby projects anyway. If you're OK with insignificant (less than $10) charges on your credit card, it's really not that hard to get pretty far with serverless. Almost everything serverless has perpetual free tiers and the ones that don't (API Gateway, CloudFront, Route 53) have very low usage-based costs (less than $1/mo idle). If you put any value at all on your time, you'd cross these amounts almost immediately trying to setup / learn anything else.
- nolite 9y agoHi, I'm suffering from the AWS billing madness too, and trying to understand if others share some of the same issues I've seen. Could I contact you to hear more about your billing frustrations?
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoIt is definitely hard to have the foresight necessary, and this whole industry could benefit from a book of devops case studies. That being said, turn off the EC2 instances and there is rarely an ongoing trickle of costs, as the other services mostly are billed on how much they are invoked, which is good for hobby projects.
- frusciante29 9y agoOfftopic, but maybe it's time people used Xcode instead of XCode, xCode etc. I didn't expect the repo's README to make this confusion.
- always_good 9y agoMeh, that's like when people correct me when I say legos instead of LEGO or OSX instead of macOS or Github instead of GitHub. God forbid someone doesn't get a corporation's branding 100% correct. Correcting them seems petty and doesn't elevate the convo.
- alexnewman 9y agoI still have no idea why people like the lambda environment. I assume it's because their organization still makes things like docker hard.
- chollier 9y agoI think this title is missing a few buzzwords
- hamburglar1 9y agoAm I the only one who thinks that getting all of this stuff for free is a bad thing not a good thing? If you don't know how your auth works, how your server is running, and what exactly all these third party business logic libs do under the hood, you make debugging difficult and don't have a mental model for performance and scaling considerations.
- gt2 9y agoSurprised at the lack of tests, client or server. I'm not just talking about client view code -- there's a lot of logic in the javascript helper methods. Also, is there any way to run something like DynamoDB locally to run tests against? Perhaps you would need to make a separate test instance of the DynamoDB on AWS to run tests against? This would be less than ideal due to latency.