6 ms·

Ride the Serverless Wave with DigitalOcean's One-Click Droplet

56 points by alexellisuk 8y ago

013a 8y ago
"Ride the serverless wave by creating and maintaining a server"
- sho 8y ago
  You beat me to it. While this looks like some fairly cool automation, the very first step is to create a bloody server.
  - garettmd 8y ago
    This is a funny thing, but still, having a "Function as a Service" is a nice tool to have, regardless of how truly "serverless" it is. Lambda, et al offer the convenience of not having to run your own server, but a FaaS is a great concept regardless of whether you're hosting it yourself or using a cloud provider's version.
    - atonse 8y ago
      I don't see how. I thought the whole use case for FaaS is that you're only paying for the literally milliseconds of compute time you use, and nothing more. But if you're already paying for the server, what's the point? I suppose you could host a lot more low-volume apps on one server?
      - stereographic 8y ago
        This is pretty edge case for who it would be useful for in my opinion? I have a small droplet on digital ocean I use to host a few small personal projects. $5/month is pretty reasonable and if I don't want to sign up for AWS, this is a fairly beneficial thing to know about. For people who want to use serverless functionality for cost benefit, it's probably not as helpful.
        pc86 8y ago
        Serious question, what is the benefit to "serverless functionality" if not financial? The only benefit I'm aware of in micro-/milli-second level billing, and the infrastructure being obfuscated away from you.
        stereographic 8y ago
        Personally, it would be the benefit of not running 10+ express apps on a small server 24/7. I use a small server for personal projects and the traffic they get is minimal, but I also run a few small utilities off the same low-spec server 24/7. This is about the only benefit I see personally for me
- elliotec 8y ago
  Ok, we get it, “serverless” doesn’t mean “without a server.” its a misnomer. Can we all accept this now and talk about it underneath the semantics or does someone have the power to change it industry-wide? Just feels like every discussion about this technology is hijacked by the stupid nameto the point it’s all some can focus on.
  - minimaxir 8y ago
    Normally, running a serverless App on something like AWS or GCP doesn't involve actually setting up a server as a part of the workflow.
  - 013a 8y ago
    "Serverless" isn't a misnomer. It's the movement of management of everything below some API and/or Runtime to outside of your organization. A technology can enable a serverless culture within an organization, but that doesn't mean every deployment of a so-called "serverless" technology is actually serverless. If I write a lambda function, but then my ops team deploys it on a piece of metal running in their closet, its not serverless. Inversely, I can write a traditional stateful NodeJS app and give it to Heroku, and it becomes Serverless. In that sense, Serverless isn't really a quality of the technology, though certain technologies are optimized to be serverless. Its a quality of how its deployed, and more importantly your organizational culture around that. Of course, technologists hate this definition because we can't just call whatever we want Serverless. Moreover, Serverless starts seeming a lot less like the desired end-state we should aim for; often it makes sense to manage your own servers, just like it sometimes makes sense to manage your own hardware. OpenFaaS can totally be serverless. But to qualify, we'd have to be talking about an underlying Kubernetes infrastructure that abstracts the metal and OS away, so something like Fargate or Azure Containers. Certainly not on DigitalOcean. Here's the signal: If I can SSH into something within the stack, it's not Serverless.
lonk 8y ago
There are shipload of "one-clicks" while doing this.
js4ever 8y ago
Aws lambda is serverless. This is not because you have to maintain a server
- sidlls 8y ago
  "Serverless" is one of the worst misnomers I've ever seen.
  - folkrav 8y ago
    "Serverless" is just "server as a service". Horrible misnomer indeed.
    - humblebee 8y ago
      My naive take is that serverless is just a movement back to the simplicity of ftp + cgi / php. It all looks very similar, just with a different pricing model, and a different implementation cloud computing vs shared hosting.
      - kolanos 8y ago
        In what ways do they look similar?
        motogpjimbo 8y ago
        Not GP, but uploading a single Javascript function to AWS in the form of a zip file is essentially identical to uploading an individual PHP script to a shared host via FTP/SFTP. The workflow around that process (or rather, the lack of workflow) is the same as the process for developing CGI applications in the 90s/early 2000s. Of course, Serverless also offers elastic scaling and non-HTTP triggers, so that's a point of difference. For all the talk of elastic scaling, I suspect that a lot of people are enjoying the idea of Serverless at the moment simply because it harks back to an earlier, pre-framework, pre-workflow approach to web development.
rbosinger 8y ago
This is just for the MVP. The next phase is to take all those functions, package them up in a monolithic framework so they can work together and then deploy to a machine in the office's server closet.
vasilakisfil 8y ago
on a side note, heroku can be really nice serverless provider. The instances can be created (using the API) in a couple of seconds. And you can run anything in it.
- extra88 8y ago
  Are you suggesting that an end user should be able to click a button on your site that will run client-side JavaScript spin up a Heroku instance to perform an action? That sounds dangerous and slow. How is destruction of the instance handled?
  - petercooper 8y ago
    Doesn't sound like the world's best idea, but I guess it could potentially work on things like ETL or maintenance tasks - not so much for quicker, end user operations at scale.
  - vasilakisfil 8y ago
    no, I am suggesting using it based on what it provides. Lag 2-3 seconds, power: multi-cpu, up to 12 GB ram. So obviously it's not for trivial cases like "click a button, spin up a lambda" but more to "upload a video, spin up instance to resize/shrink/format/compress". Serverless has many use cases.
bdcravens 8y ago
Will we ever get to the point where we can talk about "serverless" (FaaS) without half the comments being about the term?
- detaro 8y ago
  When people start saying FaaS or something else specific instead of "serverless" probably.
- ohithereyou 8y ago
  How is FaaS different from other RPC technologies that already exist like CORBA or SOAP?
- pc86 8y ago
  I've seen plenty of articles about Lambda where aside from one or two quips about "Acktually, it's not really serverless yanno" the comments are largely constructive or technical. But this is "use serverless by setting up and managing one of our servers," so I think the derision is pretty well placed, and I say that as a huge fan of DigitalOcean.

56 points by alexellisuk 8y ago

013a 8y ago

"Ride the serverless wave by creating and maintaining a server"

sho 8y ago
You beat me to it. While this looks like some fairly cool automation, the very first step is to create a bloody server.
- garettmd 8y ago
  This is a funny thing, but still, having a "Function as a Service" is a nice tool to have, regardless of how truly "serverless" it is. Lambda, et al offer the convenience of not having to run your own server, but a FaaS is a great concept regardless of whether you're hosting it yourself or using a cloud provider's version.
  - atonse 8y ago
    I don't see how. I thought the whole use case for FaaS is that you're only paying for the literally milliseconds of compute time you use, and nothing more. But if you're already paying for the server, what's the point? I suppose you could host a lot more low-volume apps on one server?
    - stereographic 8y ago
      This is pretty edge case for who it would be useful for in my opinion? I have a small droplet on digital ocean I use to host a few small personal projects. $5/month is pretty reasonable and if I don't want to sign up for AWS, this is a fairly beneficial thing to know about. For people who want to use serverless functionality for cost benefit, it's probably not as helpful.
      - pc86 8y ago
        Serious question, what is the benefit to "serverless functionality" if not financial? The only benefit I'm aware of in micro-/milli-second level billing, and the infrastructure being obfuscated away from you.
        stereographic 8y ago
        Personally, it would be the benefit of not running 10+ express apps on a small server 24/7. I use a small server for personal projects and the traffic they get is minimal, but I also run a few small utilities off the same low-spec server 24/7. This is about the only benefit I see personally for me
elliotec 8y ago
Ok, we get it, “serverless” doesn’t mean “without a server.” its a misnomer. Can we all accept this now and talk about it underneath the semantics or does someone have the power to change it industry-wide? Just feels like every discussion about this technology is hijacked by the stupid nameto the point it’s all some can focus on.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  Normally, running a serverless App on something like AWS or GCP doesn't involve actually setting up a server as a part of the workflow.
- 013a 8y ago
  "Serverless" isn't a misnomer. It's the movement of management of everything below some API and/or Runtime to outside of your organization. A technology can enable a serverless culture within an organization, but that doesn't mean every deployment of a so-called "serverless" technology is actually serverless. If I write a lambda function, but then my ops team deploys it on a piece of metal running in their closet, its not serverless. Inversely, I can write a traditional stateful NodeJS app and give it to Heroku, and it becomes Serverless. In that sense, Serverless isn't really a quality of the technology, though certain technologies are optimized to be serverless. Its a quality of how its deployed, and more importantly your organizational culture around that. Of course, technologists hate this definition because we can't just call whatever we want Serverless. Moreover, Serverless starts seeming a lot less like the desired end-state we should aim for; often it makes sense to manage your own servers, just like it sometimes makes sense to manage your own hardware. OpenFaaS can totally be serverless. But to qualify, we'd have to be talking about an underlying Kubernetes infrastructure that abstracts the metal and OS away, so something like Fargate or Azure Containers. Certainly not on DigitalOcean. Here's the signal: If I can SSH into something within the stack, it's not Serverless.

lonk 8y ago

There are shipload of "one-clicks" while doing this.

js4ever 8y ago

Aws lambda is serverless. This is not because you have to maintain a server

sidlls 8y ago
"Serverless" is one of the worst misnomers I've ever seen.
- folkrav 8y ago
  "Serverless" is just "server as a service". Horrible misnomer indeed.
  - humblebee 8y ago
    My naive take is that serverless is just a movement back to the simplicity of ftp + cgi / php. It all looks very similar, just with a different pricing model, and a different implementation cloud computing vs shared hosting.
    - kolanos 8y ago
      In what ways do they look similar?
      - motogpjimbo 8y ago
        Not GP, but uploading a single Javascript function to AWS in the form of a zip file is essentially identical to uploading an individual PHP script to a shared host via FTP/SFTP. The workflow around that process (or rather, the lack of workflow) is the same as the process for developing CGI applications in the 90s/early 2000s. Of course, Serverless also offers elastic scaling and non-HTTP triggers, so that's a point of difference. For all the talk of elastic scaling, I suspect that a lot of people are enjoying the idea of Serverless at the moment simply because it harks back to an earlier, pre-framework, pre-workflow approach to web development.

rbosinger 8y ago

This is just for the MVP. The next phase is to take all those functions, package them up in a monolithic framework so they can work together and then deploy to a machine in the office's server closet.

vasilakisfil 8y ago

on a side note, heroku can be really nice serverless provider. The instances can be created (using the API) in a couple of seconds. And you can run anything in it.

extra88 8y ago
Are you suggesting that an end user should be able to click a button on your site that will run client-side JavaScript spin up a Heroku instance to perform an action? That sounds dangerous and slow. How is destruction of the instance handled?
- petercooper 8y ago
  Doesn't sound like the world's best idea, but I guess it could potentially work on things like ETL or maintenance tasks - not so much for quicker, end user operations at scale.
- vasilakisfil 8y ago
  no, I am suggesting using it based on what it provides. Lag 2-3 seconds, power: multi-cpu, up to 12 GB ram. So obviously it's not for trivial cases like "click a button, spin up a lambda" but more to "upload a video, spin up instance to resize/shrink/format/compress". Serverless has many use cases.

bdcravens 8y ago

Will we ever get to the point where we can talk about "serverless" (FaaS) without half the comments being about the term?

detaro 8y ago
When people start saying FaaS or something else specific instead of "serverless" probably.
ohithereyou 8y ago
How is FaaS different from other RPC technologies that already exist like CORBA or SOAP?
pc86 8y ago
I've seen plenty of articles about Lambda where aside from one or two quips about "Acktually, it's not really serverless yanno" the comments are largely constructive or technical. But this is "use serverless by setting up and managing one of our servers," so I think the derision is pretty well placed, and I say that as a huge fan of DigitalOcean.