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Hey HN, I've been eager to share this with you. I've finally released and I think this is going to be very useful for a lot of devs who are like me. Coherence

Hey HN, I've been eager to share this with you. I've finally released and I think this is going to be very useful for a lot of devs who are like me. Coherence API is a twist on serverless that lets you deploy and run code the same way you call a local function. It integrates with the programming language so you can just pass a func and it's getting run. No need to change your workflow or toolset. I'll be here to answer any questions.

sharemywin 9y ago
how do you stop someone from entering into some kind of malicious code?
- bthornbury 9y ago
  We've made the assumption that users will enter malicious code and designed the security boundaries around that. A malicious user that manages to break out of the container environment will only have access to other instances of their own applications. Stronger security policies exist between users.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    I read the concern more as "what do you do to stop someone from cURLing an .iso a million times from someone's S3 account".
    - bthornbury 9y ago
      I'm not too sure what you mean here. In terms of DOS'ing our services, we limit disk space usage per job, and are working on bandwidth limitations (this is a weakness, but for now we'll just ban abusers and work with those with legit needs)
      - ceejayoz 9y ago
        Not DOSing your services, using your services to DOS others. Or things like using stolen credit cards to do Bitcoin mining.
        bthornbury 9y ago
        Every services provider will deal with this. We have plans but ultimately won't really know until we're in the thick of it. Our plans though are to limit bandwidth and ban abusers. We'll work with Stripe's Radar platform to reduce the stolen credit card fraud.
politician 9y ago
If I build 92 of these things and they communicate with each other over sockets, files, streams, or messages, how does Coherence (a) help me visualize and debug that network, (b) transition the processing graph to a new state safely (blue/green deployments to one or more collaborating components)? The problem that I have with these Serverless stacks is that they all demo pretty well for the trivial case of "it sends emails / transcodes video / puts files in S3" but then jump to "run your entire business on this" without clearly showing how its possible to do that with a complex system. Is your solution different?
- bthornbury 9y ago
  Hey, help me understand how you envision Coherence could help you debug that network. I'm moving over some of my own services to Coherence so it's very much intended to "run your whole business".
  - politician 9y ago
    There is so much more to running a cloud system than running a function - monitoring the function (billing, errors, throughput, latency), scaling the function, moving data between two functions, storing data, signaling a function, upgrading a function, downgrading a function, upgrading the stored data, authorizing the function to run, upgrading and downgrading stored data and functions while taking customer traffic with zero downtime without data loss. "Backend-as-a-service" businesses need to check all of those boxes.
    - bthornbury 9y ago
      I'm going to decompress part of your comment here: - scaling the function This is where we've invested most of our effort. We're envisioning a load test demo soon. - monitoring the function (billing, errors, throughput, latency) This is something which we will need to invest more in. Great feedback here. We don't have much in the way of monitoring yet, but everything is there and we just need to expose it to the users. - moving data between two functions, storing data Traditional solutions like Redis and Postgres seem like a good solution here. You can't host them on Coherence yet, but it's something that we're working on. - signaling a function, upgrading a function, downgrading a function Versioning is particularly interesting here. A lot of time we've thought of these functions as ephemeral. Send me an email (bryan at coherenceapi . com) I'm really interested to talk more about the use cases you're envisioning.

sharemywin 9y ago

how do you stop someone from entering into some kind of malicious code?

bthornbury 9y ago
We've made the assumption that users will enter malicious code and designed the security boundaries around that. A malicious user that manages to break out of the container environment will only have access to other instances of their own applications. Stronger security policies exist between users.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  I read the concern more as "what do you do to stop someone from cURLing an .iso a million times from someone's S3 account".
  - bthornbury 9y ago
    I'm not too sure what you mean here. In terms of DOS'ing our services, we limit disk space usage per job, and are working on bandwidth limitations (this is a weakness, but for now we'll just ban abusers and work with those with legit needs)
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      Not DOSing your services, using your services to DOS others. Or things like using stolen credit cards to do Bitcoin mining.
      - bthornbury 9y ago
        Every services provider will deal with this. We have plans but ultimately won't really know until we're in the thick of it. Our plans though are to limit bandwidth and ban abusers. We'll work with Stripe's Radar platform to reduce the stolen credit card fraud.

politician 9y ago

If I build 92 of these things and they communicate with each other over sockets, files, streams, or messages, how does Coherence (a) help me visualize and debug that network, (b) transition the processing graph to a new state safely (blue/green deployments to one or more collaborating components)? The problem that I have with these Serverless stacks is that they all demo pretty well for the trivial case of "it sends emails / transcodes video / puts files in S3" but then jump to "run your entire business on this" without clearly showing how its possible to do that with a complex system. Is your solution different?

bthornbury 9y ago
Hey, help me understand how you envision Coherence could help you debug that network. I'm moving over some of my own services to Coherence so it's very much intended to "run your whole business".
- politician 9y ago
  There is so much more to running a cloud system than running a function - monitoring the function (billing, errors, throughput, latency), scaling the function, moving data between two functions, storing data, signaling a function, upgrading a function, downgrading a function, upgrading the stored data, authorizing the function to run, upgrading and downgrading stored data and functions while taking customer traffic with zero downtime without data loss. "Backend-as-a-service" businesses need to check all of those boxes.
  - bthornbury 9y ago
    I'm going to decompress part of your comment here: - scaling the function This is where we've invested most of our effort. We're envisioning a load test demo soon. - monitoring the function (billing, errors, throughput, latency) This is something which we will need to invest more in. Great feedback here. We don't have much in the way of monitoring yet, but everything is there and we just need to expose it to the users. - moving data between two functions, storing data Traditional solutions like Redis and Postgres seem like a good solution here. You can't host them on Coherence yet, but it's something that we're working on. - signaling a function, upgrading a function, downgrading a function Versioning is particularly interesting here. A lot of time we've thought of these functions as ephemeral. Send me an email (bryan at coherenceapi . com) I'm really interested to talk more about the use cases you're envisioning.