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An open source GitHub-like platform as an alternative for AWS Lambda
- friendly_chap 9y agoHi guys! One of the authors here! We hope you enjoy this much loved project we are building with our tiny team. This is a love project of a team who failed at a startup. We decided to build something we love before getting back to our normal lives :) I have worked in the faas/microservices space for years before but never wanted to build something like this (I thought it was too early to explain what we are doing). Now with the advent of faas/serverless/lambda perhaps it's a bit easier. Our focus is building something that enables service reusability and composability: no more writing the same login service multiple times. We would also like to host other peoples low traffic services for free if we can (right now we can't because we are on a small server, fixing that). Thanks
- paradite 9y ago.
- samb1729 9y agoI don't agree. The project is indicating which major version of Angular it uses. The reasoning in the post you linked doesn't really apply.
- friendly_chap 9y agoYou don't have to delete your comment, it's nothing to be ashamed of. The angular versioning situation is really not that simple. And you are right, the ReadMe likely should say Angular 5 and not Angular 2.
- paradite 9y agoFor some reason I am getting downvoted quite heavily for it so I thought deleting it might stop that. But apparently now it is just getting more downvotes. Oh well.
- dopamean 9y agoWhy do you care?
- paradite 9y agoI don't know about you but I do feel really bad when I get downvoted, especially when I don't understand why and have no way to find out.
- k__ 9y agoIsn't there a maximum of 4 downvotes?
- codingdave 9y agoI wouldn't worry so much about it. This is an opinionated group, and having a different opinion is sometimes not taken well, but it is good to challenge the status quo, and good to not be part of groupthink. If you stand by what you said, take your downvotes with pride. On the other hand, claiming something that isn't true, or being flippant or not contributing to the conversation will also result in downvotes. And those are probably a good guide of how to adjust your communication style to work better within the group. I have no idea what your original comment was, so I don't know which of those scenarios is the case here.
- fapjacks 9y agoIf the points and resultant behavior shaping really get you down, check out this stupid simple Chrome extension: https://github.com/fapjacks/antihnbs https://github.com/fapjacks/antihnbs All visible point totals become 1, and all shades of grey become black.
- reificator 9y agoHuman beings are hardwired to feel an aversion to social rejection. Downvotes are anonymous social rejection at scale without the standard feedback loop that allows people to recover and save face.
- JepZ 9y agoI wanted to thank you for Golang support which I was missing on AWS for long. Before commenting I just did a quick Google search 'AWS Golang support' and found this (not even 24 hours old): https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/compute/announcing-go-support-for-aws-lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/compute/announcing-go-suppor... Sounds like this HN post is a day late ;-) Nevertheless, your project looks like fun and open source solutions are always better than functional equivalent proprietary solutions.
- friendly_chap 9y agoHaha! It was that announcement which gave me the idea to post this now in the first place. Thanks, and we agree about the proprietary bit - hopefully we as a community will have the tools to handle raw machines easily and conveniently (I think that's the biggest selling point of GC & AWS), because the amount of money wasted on GC and AWS is just insane.
- la6470 9y agoTheoretically interesting but practically useless. What is the business value?
- richmarr 9y agoStuff like this is really useful, although does miss some of the key benefits of Lambda-like services... the connection between billing and usage on a per-function basis, the ability to monetise your functions, the ability to scale genuinely on demand rather than with the lead time required to spin up new containers or VMs.
- friendly_chap 9y agoSome of that is coming, but right now it's only 3 of us who are building this. It also doesn't aim to be a carbon copy of anything - we have a bunch of ideas we would like to explore ourselves (we think it's better for the community this way).
- imglorp 9y agoGood stuff in GP list... plus I'm looking for rate limiting to curb abuse (in your service offering).
- ctpide 9y agoGood point about the billing. In our case FAAS is not offered by the cloud provider (yet), but we are stuck with them. They want us to spin up a server for every service. We started doing micro-services, but it’s just so much overhead compared to serverless. I rather deploy something like this, even without 1-1 mapping in regards to billing.
- sacheendra 9y agoAlso checkout Fission (https://github.com/fission/fission https://github.com/fission/fission). A Kubernetes based FaaS platform in which you can define functions in any language and link them together using a DSL.
- jacques_chester 9y agoAlso OpenWhisk, Kubeless, Fn, OpenFaaS, Riff (I work on this) and probably a dozen others by now that I've forgotten.
- imglorp 9y agoIs there a list of hosted FaaS offerings somewhere?
- bruth 9y agohttps://github.com/anaibol/awesome-serverless#hosting-and-code-execution-in-the-cloud https://github.com/anaibol/awesome-serverless#hosting-and-co...
- alexellisuk 9y agoThanks for mentioning OpenFaaS - the Kubernetes-native frameworks provide a deep integration with existing deployments and ecosystem.
- appleflaxen 9y agoFWIW: I tried to register and couldn't. The red error box appeared in bottom right corner, but was blank so I don't know what failed. Nothing crazy in my submission that I can see. Even when inspecting error box, no indication of why it failed was apparent. Maybe it's because you're on the frontpage and getting lots of requests?
- friendly_chap 9y agoIt's very likely because of the HN hug! We will have a look and fix it, sorry. Good news is perhaps on your own machine it will run flawlessly :)))
- tnolet 9y agoGreat for people stuck with some ancient hosting provider or on prem solution. Not say great for cost as literally the first you need to run this is serverless solution is...a server! Still super nice job.
- moxious 9y agoI'm cringing so hard at the idea of a tech guy somewhere explaining to his boss that "we can't go serverless because we don't have enough servers for that". You know that conversation is happening in an office somewhere. Godspeed, poor engineer.
- friendly_chap 9y agoEveryone knows that serverless is a misnomer :). Cost wise I think you gain a lot of control by using something like this - as you can install it on premise, or any hosting provider, or your own colocated servers.
- sleepybrett 9y agoServerless for your engineers, serverfull for your ops people.
- Rjevski 9y agoShame it doesn't support Python nor PostgreSQL
- friendly_chap 9y agoIt's coming as it's rather easy to add support for running Python apps. However, we don't have the python know how to implement automatic Python client generation for services.
- gsvclass 9y agoCheckout SanFran - Lambda like serverless functions platform for Kubernetes https://github.com/dosco/sanfran https://github.com/dosco/sanfran The main focus of its design was fast function startup time and horizontal scaling. Fast function startup is done with a combination of pool of warm containers and instant container recycling. As for horizontal scaling functions can themselves scale horizontally in high QPS situations and for large deployments every micro-service that makes up SanFran can itself be scaled horizontally. Currently working on using machine learning to predictions to manage warm container pools.
- gsvclass 9y agoFor anyone looking to try this out I would recommend Google Kubernetes cluster (choose the cheap preemptive vm machine type) and you can have a 5 node Kubernetes cluster running for less than 10 bucks a month. Google's new pricing means they don't charge for Kubernetes just for the instances. SanFran can be installed with a single Helm command. helm install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dosco/sanfran/master/helm-chart/sanfran-0.1.0.tgz https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dosco/sanfran/master/helm-...
- kitd 9y agoSo what do you think of the posted project?
- gsvclass 9y agoFrom taking a quick look its a great project for trusted environments and smaller use cases. I'm unclear from the documentation how I would scale this for anything more than a single machine without heavy devops overhead and when anyone across the org. runs their own functions where isolation etc is pretty important.
- merb 9y agoeh... why should I need a "serverless functions platform for Kubernetes" especially since I actually need servers for kubernetes. and I can probably do most stuff way easier than having a framework on top of another deployment/app scheduling framework.
- _Marak_ 9y agoThere is also https://hook.io/ https://hook.io/ which is a similar open-source platform that's been running for three years and has over 142 million deployments. I'm using this service everyday, also I created it.
- friendly_chap 9y agoHi Marak! Hats off to you. I remember when talking with Asim Aslam about him going and creating micro (https://github.com/micro https://github.com/micro), a microservices framework, I tried to advise him to go high level, as high level as possible and create a complete platform. I used hook.io as the example of a project which is on the right path. He said the world is not ready for it. I said some day someone will make a tool like hook.io and promote it well and get incredibly popular. Turns out we were both right. Seems like the world is ready for these kind of solutions now, and you were ahead of the curve with hook.io.
- _Marak_ 9y agoGreetings! Thank you for the kind words. It's really good to see more developers getting into the space of writing open-source platforms for services. I believe there is room for much growth in this field. I'll take a deeper dive into 1backend and check out how it works. hook.io has pretty much a zero dollar budget and maybe $150 spent on marketing. It's been slowly and steadily growing for the past years and I'm happy with it's progress. I'm currently working on building integrated hardware solutions with raspberry pi to offer an open-source local version of Amazon Echo or Google Assistant type devices.
- koolba 9y ago> I'm currently working on building integrated hardware solutions with raspberry pi to offer an open-source local version of Amazon Echo or Google Assistant type devices. Any info on the software side of your project? I've been looking for exactly that (FOSS programmable digital assistant totally under my control). Closest I've seen so far is Jasper[1] but it's still pretty raw. [1]: http://jasperproject.github.io http://jasperproject.github.io
- Ataraxy 9y agoYou should also check out https://webtask.io https://webtask.io by the Auth0 people. They have an in browser code editor that's fantastic.
- _Marak_ 9y agoWebtask is a solid and well designed product. Kudos to Tomasz Janczuk and his team at Auth0. The only thing I don't like about Webtask is that it's not an open-source project, so there is no way for me to run their backend on my own hardware ( like a raspberry pi ).
- heavenlyblue 9y agoI am currently looking for something along the lines of a distributed CPU - or Amazon Lambda, but enabling me to run sets of interdependent computation steps "in the cloud". Also - supporting redundancy and replication (so that a running program would never crash if one of the servers it was running on has crashed). Any ideas?
- jwilk 9y agoWhat does "GitHub-like" mean?
- friendly_chap 9y agoIt means we want to build a similarly accessible platform for microservices/faas as what github did with git repos. We use them as basis of comparison because we have a lot of respect for their product/ideas and we are inspired by them a lot (well sometimes we just simply steal ideas from them, haha). I guess we are trying to convey the idea that it's a complete product from user management to charging - you could install it for your company or launch a web hosting company with it.
- Sharma 9y agoInteresting launch. Last month for Producthunt hackathon I was planning to create something similar by using openfaas, but did not(just like many other ideas/side projects we all have here :-)). One questions that bothered me a lot was how to define pricing for such product? Would you be able to throw some light on how you/your team came up with the sustainable plan and pricing you have?
- friendly_chap 9y agoHi Sharma! The basic idea in terms of pricing was low cost and low maintenance for low traffic things: when someone is not running anything substantial even 10 quid a month feels like a waste. And then when you start to have multiple side projects, you might need multiple servers (or set up more complex things like port forwarding based on domain etc) So that's how it came about. But we are sure it's not sustainable entirely yet! We would just like to provide low cost and low hassle hosting. Let's see how it goes.
- purplerabbit 9y agoEveryone here should check out https://github.com/apex/up.. https://github.com/apex/up... No exaggeration: it's the serverless platform we've all been dreaming of. Also, it is VERY easy to migrate to for many projects, and has great language support... and it's developed by TJ Holowaychuk.
- drdrey 9y agoWorking link: https://github.com/apex/up https://github.com/apex/up Docs: https://up.docs.apex.sh/ https://up.docs.apex.sh/
- jadeklerk 9y agoFantastic to see open source alternatives. At a previous job, I was repeatedly frustrated using AWS lambda's extremely closed-source environment.