4 ms·

> containers as Lambdas. How similar is AWS Fargate to what you're describing?

by discodave 8y ago

xmly 8y ago
Pricing model is not serverless. The basic serverless principle is no-use-no-pay.
- talawahtech 8y ago
  Theoretically, if container start up times are around 125ms it should be possible to achieve this with Fargate + Knative's "scale to zero" functionality[1]. AWS is already working on improving Fargate/Kubernetes integration. [1] https://cloud.google.com/knative/ https://cloud.google.com/knative/
  - coder543 8y ago
    Doesn't a Kubernetes master on Fargate cost a significantly non-zero amount of money? Pretty sure it does.
    - talawahdotnet 8y ago
      Sure, but if you already have one then there is no incremental cost. It would be great if they announced that they were gonna remove EKS master costs altogether. Technically Firecracker should make it possible for them to run that infrastructure more efficiently :)
    - sitkack 8y ago
      Only dev instances should see zero traffic, any production site will have > 0 load at all times.
      - coder543 8y ago
        That's not completely accurate. - If we're talking about a business that provides a service to local companies, there are quite a few hours during the week where everyone is either asleep or enjoying their weekend. Not every company has millions of users spread across every time zone; some companies provide a niche service to a small number of high paying users. - Lots of developers have small hobby projects that are inactive for most of the day/week. Scale to zero can be convenient, but it's not usually a make-or-break thing.
        sitkack 8y ago
        Those folks would be ideally suited for Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. All of the function as a service providers have a cost model that only make sense for < (some really low qps). A $10 DO instance can handle how many $$ worth of FuncaaS?
        coder543 8y ago
        I mean, the first 1 million Lambda invocations and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute are free each month... you can do a lot of things within the free tier alone. That free allocation represents about $7 worth of Lambda resources. Assuming that it cost the same to write your application to run in Lambda as it would to write it as standalone, which it almost certainly doesn't due to (probably) immature frameworks, that would be really nice for certain businesses. I agree that it is a niche, and savings of a few dollars a month aren't generally valuable to viable businesses. What I was getting at is that the "scale to zero" feature with Knative is rather worthless if you spend more money just running the Kubernetes master on EKS alone than you would spend running a $5 or $10 per month DigitalOcean instance. Lambda scales all the way to zero, and it's free when it's at zero. You just pay for what you use. Actually, you pay for what you use minus $7, since every account always gets the free tier for Lambda.
        sitkack 8y ago
        I was using the DO instance as a standard unit, so on DO $10 gives you (1vCPU 2GB) 5M GB seconds (2 * 86e3 * 28) 2400M function invocations @1k qps, (86e3 * 1e3 * 28 / 1e6) with that, the DO query load represents $17k Does the math checkout? I know which model allows me to "scale to zero" faster. If I hand you $10, you will give me a nice used Honda?
  - xmly 8y ago
    Yep, if with KNative, it is possible.
sudhirj 8y ago
I need to run 1+ Fargate containers 24/7, which is useless and wasteful. With Fargate-Lambda crossover I wouldn't be running anything 24/7, and it would be a lot less resource intensive than one Lambda-Container per request as well. Google's App Engine gets / got this right when they first launched, but to make it work they had to demand apps be written for their sandbox (like AWS Lambda), because of which the model isn't as general purpose. Firecracker would allow regular containers to be used this way, making a Firecracker service the first service to allow general purpose servers to be started and stopped (all the way to zero) based on incoming traffic.
- sciurus 8y ago
  I think with the App Engine Standard generation 2 runtimes you don't have to write to their sandbox anymore. It still has to be one of their supported languages though, instead of any arbitrary server. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-app-engine-second-generation-runtimes-and-python-3-7 https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-app-e...
  - thesandlord 8y ago
    Serverless Container support is coming to GCP: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/serverlesscontainers/ https://services.google.com/fb/forms/serverlesscontainers/
  - chrisbroadfoot 8y ago
    Very easy to exec() into an arbitrary binary from these 2nd generation runtimes. (and, as thesandlord notes below, arbitrary containers is the idea behind g.co/serverlesscontainers) Disclaimer: I work on GCP.
tybit 8y ago
Another missing piece in addition to the billing aspect mentioned elsewhere, is all the existing event based integrations lambda provides. E.g. react to kinesis, sqs, sns etc. events. having aws manage the event plumbing in addition to start/pause/stop is really nice.

> containers as Lambdas. How similar is AWS Fargate to what you're describing?

xmly 8y ago

Pricing model is not serverless. The basic serverless principle is no-use-no-pay.

talawahtech 8y ago
Theoretically, if container start up times are around 125ms it should be possible to achieve this with Fargate + Knative's "scale to zero" functionality[1]. AWS is already working on improving Fargate/Kubernetes integration. [1] https://cloud.google.com/knative/ https://cloud.google.com/knative/
- coder543 8y ago
  Doesn't a Kubernetes master on Fargate cost a significantly non-zero amount of money? Pretty sure it does.
  - talawahdotnet 8y ago
    Sure, but if you already have one then there is no incremental cost. It would be great if they announced that they were gonna remove EKS master costs altogether. Technically Firecracker should make it possible for them to run that infrastructure more efficiently :)
  - sitkack 8y ago
    Only dev instances should see zero traffic, any production site will have > 0 load at all times.
    - coder543 8y ago
      That's not completely accurate. - If we're talking about a business that provides a service to local companies, there are quite a few hours during the week where everyone is either asleep or enjoying their weekend. Not every company has millions of users spread across every time zone; some companies provide a niche service to a small number of high paying users. - Lots of developers have small hobby projects that are inactive for most of the day/week. Scale to zero can be convenient, but it's not usually a make-or-break thing.
      - sitkack 8y ago
        Those folks would be ideally suited for Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. All of the function as a service providers have a cost model that only make sense for < (some really low qps). A $10 DO instance can handle how many $$ worth of FuncaaS?
        coder543 8y ago
        I mean, the first 1 million Lambda invocations and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute are free each month... you can do a lot of things within the free tier alone. That free allocation represents about $7 worth of Lambda resources. Assuming that it cost the same to write your application to run in Lambda as it would to write it as standalone, which it almost certainly doesn't due to (probably) immature frameworks, that would be really nice for certain businesses. I agree that it is a niche, and savings of a few dollars a month aren't generally valuable to viable businesses. What I was getting at is that the "scale to zero" feature with Knative is rather worthless if you spend more money just running the Kubernetes master on EKS alone than you would spend running a $5 or $10 per month DigitalOcean instance. Lambda scales all the way to zero, and it's free when it's at zero. You just pay for what you use. Actually, you pay for what you use minus $7, since every account always gets the free tier for Lambda.
        sitkack 8y ago
        I was using the DO instance as a standard unit, so on DO $10 gives you (1vCPU 2GB) 5M GB seconds (2 * 86e3 * 28) 2400M function invocations @1k qps, (86e3 * 1e3 * 28 / 1e6) with that, the DO query load represents $17k Does the math checkout? I know which model allows me to "scale to zero" faster. If I hand you $10, you will give me a nice used Honda?
- xmly 8y ago
  Yep, if with KNative, it is possible.

sudhirj 8y ago

I need to run 1+ Fargate containers 24/7, which is useless and wasteful. With Fargate-Lambda crossover I wouldn't be running anything 24/7, and it would be a lot less resource intensive than one Lambda-Container per request as well. Google's App Engine gets / got this right when they first launched, but to make it work they had to demand apps be written for their sandbox (like AWS Lambda), because of which the model isn't as general purpose. Firecracker would allow regular containers to be used this way, making a Firecracker service the first service to allow general purpose servers to be started and stopped (all the way to zero) based on incoming traffic.

sciurus 8y ago
I think with the App Engine Standard generation 2 runtimes you don't have to write to their sandbox anymore. It still has to be one of their supported languages though, instead of any arbitrary server. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-app-engine-second-generation-runtimes-and-python-3-7 https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-app-e...
- thesandlord 8y ago
  Serverless Container support is coming to GCP: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/serverlesscontainers/ https://services.google.com/fb/forms/serverlesscontainers/
- chrisbroadfoot 8y ago
  Very easy to exec() into an arbitrary binary from these 2nd generation runtimes. (and, as thesandlord notes below, arbitrary containers is the idea behind g.co/serverlesscontainers) Disclaimer: I work on GCP.

tybit 8y ago

Another missing piece in addition to the billing aspect mentioned elsewhere, is all the existing event based integrations lambda provides. E.g. react to kinesis, sqs, sns etc. events. having aws manage the event plumbing in addition to start/pause/stop is really nice.