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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 Gate

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

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.