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+10. Lambda's are the unattainable Chalice. The API Gateway that you have to go through is byzantine. Then Route53, CloudFront, yada yada - AWS has become su

+10. Lambda's are the unattainable Chalice. The API Gateway that you have to go through is byzantine. Then Route53, CloudFront, yada yada - AWS has become such a massive bureaucracy - it changes so fast, documentation incomplete. The other issue is the inability to keep Lamda's 'hot' - as they often take several seconds to load. And of course easy shared memory and persistent file access. Lambda's are simply not designed for use web-app folks - they are designed to to back-end dev-ops and IT tasks. I think it's been like 5 years now and they are still a mess, I really want to use them, but I wont.

gaius 9y ago
Lambda's are simply not designed for use web-app folks - they are designed to to back-end dev-ops and IT tasks. Absolutely. I see people trying to serve websites out of cloud functions. Reminds me of the mid 90s when people ran httpd from inetd!
- alexasmyths 9y ago
  Yeah - but I think there is a 'massive' business case that Amazon is missing out on. Are you PM's reading this? Give us: + Lamdas without the clumsy API Gateay (or at least a simple 'pass thru' mode. + Support direct integration with Express or whatever, so we don't have to create Lambda-specific code + Allow us to keep them 'hot' so latency is low. + Give us a way to access some kind of persistent file storage with 'fs'. + Same thing for shared memory. If this were true, I would see a massive flood of people moving to Lambda's. Nobody likes to have to manage Linux instances. We'd all rather something more manageable and easy to use. I feel we are on the cusp of this and I still can hardy believe nobody has 'got it right' just yet.
  - gaius 9y ago
    I suspect the economics of a lambda that you keep hot would look very different than one that takes a few seconds to spin up. It would be identical billing to you constantly pinging it I expect. At that point if you still wanted to be serverless you would be looking at containers.
    - alexasmyths 9y ago
      "I suspect the economics of a lambda that you keep hot would look very different than one that takes a few seconds to spin up. " Surely. But what exactly are those economics? It can't be that bad.
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    + Lamdas without the clumsy API Gateay (or at least a simple 'pass thru' mode). You can call AWS Lambdas directly through the AWS SDK (or dozens of other event sources like SQS, Timers, etc.) + Allow us to keep them 'hot' so latency is low. You can keep lambdas "hot" with periodic invocations, it's not standardized, but it's a thing + Give us a way to access some kind of persistent file storage with 'fs'. There's also access to 500mb of data on /tmp. It's not always cleared after each invocation of your function, especially if it's invoked multiple times in succession, so you can use it as a "scratchpad" that provides some soft caching under high load. S3FS works if you just want to expose S3 through an 'fs' interface.
    - alexasmyths 9y ago
      That's helpful, thanks, but none of those are full solutions. Even if they are accessible via a javascript api, we need them accessible via regular HTTP for so many reasons. 'Periodic invocations' my gosh man, that seems like a big hack, requiring yet another service. I get that there is /tmp - but it's not guaranteed to be persistent. I wish it were. Anyhow - my main point is ... Lambda's don't seem to be designed for us in mind :) Thanks for the pointer on S3FS, I will definitely check that out.

gaius 9y ago

Lambda's are simply not designed for use web-app folks - they are designed to to back-end dev-ops and IT tasks. Absolutely. I see people trying to serve websites out of cloud functions. Reminds me of the mid 90s when people ran httpd from inetd!

alexasmyths 9y ago
Yeah - but I think there is a 'massive' business case that Amazon is missing out on. Are you PM's reading this? Give us: + Lamdas without the clumsy API Gateay (or at least a simple 'pass thru' mode. + Support direct integration with Express or whatever, so we don't have to create Lambda-specific code + Allow us to keep them 'hot' so latency is low. + Give us a way to access some kind of persistent file storage with 'fs'. + Same thing for shared memory. If this were true, I would see a massive flood of people moving to Lambda's. Nobody likes to have to manage Linux instances. We'd all rather something more manageable and easy to use. I feel we are on the cusp of this and I still can hardy believe nobody has 'got it right' just yet.
- gaius 9y ago
  I suspect the economics of a lambda that you keep hot would look very different than one that takes a few seconds to spin up. It would be identical billing to you constantly pinging it I expect. At that point if you still wanted to be serverless you would be looking at containers.
  - alexasmyths 9y ago
    "I suspect the economics of a lambda that you keep hot would look very different than one that takes a few seconds to spin up. " Surely. But what exactly are those economics? It can't be that bad.
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  + Lamdas without the clumsy API Gateay (or at least a simple 'pass thru' mode). You can call AWS Lambdas directly through the AWS SDK (or dozens of other event sources like SQS, Timers, etc.) + Allow us to keep them 'hot' so latency is low. You can keep lambdas "hot" with periodic invocations, it's not standardized, but it's a thing + Give us a way to access some kind of persistent file storage with 'fs'. There's also access to 500mb of data on /tmp. It's not always cleared after each invocation of your function, especially if it's invoked multiple times in succession, so you can use it as a "scratchpad" that provides some soft caching under high load. S3FS works if you just want to expose S3 through an 'fs' interface.
  - alexasmyths 9y ago
    That's helpful, thanks, but none of those are full solutions. Even if they are accessible via a javascript api, we need them accessible via regular HTTP for so many reasons. 'Periodic invocations' my gosh man, that seems like a big hack, requiring yet another service. I get that there is /tmp - but it's not guaranteed to be persistent. I wish it were. Anyhow - my main point is ... Lambda's don't seem to be designed for us in mind :) Thanks for the pointer on S3FS, I will definitely check that out.