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Big ups for calling out how bad an idea connecting to the database is from a serverless context. I do a lot with serverless on AWS Lambda. Since part of that in

Big ups for calling out how bad an idea connecting to the database is from a serverless context. I do a lot with serverless on AWS Lambda. Since part of that involves an ETL to write to a database, I also run a server that exposes a service for writing data via RPC. The server provides a connection pool to the database and appropriately encapsulates all the complex functionality we have for incoming data behind a well-defined interface. If you really insist on calling your entire stack serverless, do what we do and run these servers as ECS tasks via Fargate. That is plausibly serverless, albeit long-running. You get all the perks of a serverless environment with all the perks of something like beanstalk (without having to patch a server!). The drawback in this scenario is that running ECS tasks via Fargate don't provide as much flexibility in cost.

Agebor 8y ago
Connecting a DB might be a bad idea only currently, until cloud providers implement some sort of RPC SQL layer. We are successfully running Lambda functions connecting to AWS Aurora MySQL using IAM authentication. It has some quirks but after figuring it out, works well. Just run a connection pool with only 1 connection and expect some additional latency on cold start, though it's negligible compared to loading libraries, runtime, etc.
- zbentley 8y ago
  > implement some sort of RPC SQL layer > Just run a connection pool You just described the high-level architecture of what I believe is the majority of web application servers and the applications they run: an RPC layer over database accesses that run on persistent connections.
tnolet 8y ago
I use a specific Lambda function that acts like a sink. It receives messages via SNS from a myriad of other services and its only job is to push these messages to the main applications API. There the actual inserts and updates are done. The main API lives on Heroku.
deleted 8y ago
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Agebor 8y ago

Connecting a DB might be a bad idea only currently, until cloud providers implement some sort of RPC SQL layer. We are successfully running Lambda functions connecting to AWS Aurora MySQL using IAM authentication. It has some quirks but after figuring it out, works well. Just run a connection pool with only 1 connection and expect some additional latency on cold start, though it's negligible compared to loading libraries, runtime, etc.

zbentley 8y ago
> implement some sort of RPC SQL layer > Just run a connection pool You just described the high-level architecture of what I believe is the majority of web application servers and the applications they run: an RPC layer over database accesses that run on persistent connections.

tnolet 8y ago

I use a specific Lambda function that acts like a sink. It receives messages via SNS from a myriad of other services and its only job is to push these messages to the main applications API. There the actual inserts and updates are done. The main API lives on Heroku.

deleted 8y ago

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