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Sad to see this. What happened to the "serverless containers", especially startups working on the idea? Months ago, Zeit.co gave up the idea of hosting containe

by wanghq 8y ago

Sad to see this. What happened to the "serverless containers", especially startups working on the idea? Months ago, Zeit.co gave up the idea of hosting containers and changed their direction to FaaS . Wondering if there is a technical reason (e.g. cost effective and scalable) behind both changes. On the other hand, big cloud vendors are all providing the serverless containers while the experience may not be as smooth as the startups provide.

NathanKP 8y ago
AWS employee here. Serverless containers are hard, and there are a lot of technical challenges along the way. For context when we launched ECS years ago the goal was always to build a serverless container platform. But first we had to build out our own container orchestration platform capable of keeping track of all the containers at the scale that AWS requires, and build out a lot of underlying tech that didn't exist yet. Recently we open sourced Firecracker (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...) which is one of the pieces we built along the way to enable the data plane. It took us a few years to get to this point, which is a really long time in startup lifetime. The major cloud providers have the resources to spend a lot of time building the technical depth required to offer full featured serverless container platforms that can truly scale up and out. In my view the smaller providers like hyper.sh really nailed the initial developer experience but they are missing the depth behind the scenes that allows serverless containers to be scaled out cost effectively. In time these two ends of the spectrum will hopefully converge. By open sourcing tech like Firecracker AWS enables small providers to have access to tech that we built because we needed it, and now its available for them to use. Conversely AWS learns how to improve our developer experience by seeing how these small startups create a great developer experience.
- simonw 8y ago
  The best developer experience I have ever had was Zeit Now v1 - their serverless containers product. I would absolutely love for AWS to offer something similar (serverless Docker containers where I only pay for the periods during which they are serving traffic), ideally with a similar developer experience. Nothing puts me off faster than having to click through dozens of web UI screens (or read a hundred pages of API docs) just to get a container launched and accessible via a URL. The Zeit Now v1 model, with everything configured from a single (optional) JSON config file and deployed with a single "now" CLI command, was absolutely ideal for me.
  - simonw 8y ago
    ... huh, it looks like that fargate CLI project gets much closer to what I'm looking for: http://somanymachines.com/fargate/ http://somanymachines.com/fargate/ I do wish AWS would build experiences like this without me having to turn to the wider developer ecosystem.
  - wanghq 8y ago
    Unfortunately the serverless container supported by Zeit v1 is on a deprecation path...
  - manigandham 8y ago
    AWS Fargate, Azure Container Instances, GCP Serverless Containers (private beta). All the clouds have something to offer now, but you can also look at Kubernetes which can also run a single container very easily and has managed offerings everywhere.

by wanghq 8y ago

NathanKP 8y ago

AWS employee here. Serverless containers are hard, and there are a lot of technical challenges along the way. For context when we launched ECS years ago the goal was always to build a serverless container platform. But first we had to build out our own container orchestration platform capable of keeping track of all the containers at the scale that AWS requires, and build out a lot of underlying tech that didn't exist yet. Recently we open sourced Firecracker (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...) which is one of the pieces we built along the way to enable the data plane. It took us a few years to get to this point, which is a really long time in startup lifetime. The major cloud providers have the resources to spend a lot of time building the technical depth required to offer full featured serverless container platforms that can truly scale up and out. In my view the smaller providers like hyper.sh really nailed the initial developer experience but they are missing the depth behind the scenes that allows serverless containers to be scaled out cost effectively. In time these two ends of the spectrum will hopefully converge. By open sourcing tech like Firecracker AWS enables small providers to have access to tech that we built because we needed it, and now its available for them to use. Conversely AWS learns how to improve our developer experience by seeing how these small startups create a great developer experience.

simonw 8y ago
The best developer experience I have ever had was Zeit Now v1 - their serverless containers product. I would absolutely love for AWS to offer something similar (serverless Docker containers where I only pay for the periods during which they are serving traffic), ideally with a similar developer experience. Nothing puts me off faster than having to click through dozens of web UI screens (or read a hundred pages of API docs) just to get a container launched and accessible via a URL. The Zeit Now v1 model, with everything configured from a single (optional) JSON config file and deployed with a single "now" CLI command, was absolutely ideal for me.
- simonw 8y ago
  ... huh, it looks like that fargate CLI project gets much closer to what I'm looking for: http://somanymachines.com/fargate/ http://somanymachines.com/fargate/ I do wish AWS would build experiences like this without me having to turn to the wider developer ecosystem.
- wanghq 8y ago
  Unfortunately the serverless container supported by Zeit v1 is on a deprecation path...
- manigandham 8y ago
  AWS Fargate, Azure Container Instances, GCP Serverless Containers (private beta). All the clouds have something to offer now, but you can also look at Kubernetes which can also run a single container very easily and has managed offerings everywhere.