4 ms·

> It's so slow (iteration speed) and you need to jump through a billion hoops of complexity all over the place. Even dealing with something as simple as loading

> It's so slow (iteration speed) and you need to jump through a billion hoops of complexity all over the place. Even dealing with something as simple as loading environment variables for both local and "real" function invokes required way too much effort. Honestly, it reminds me of PHP development years ago: running it locally sucked, so you need to upload it to the server and test your work. It. Sucked.

kortilla 6y ago
It was actually pretty good if you had an IDE with sftp/scp support because you could save a file, refresh your browser, and have immediate new results.
- nickjj 6y ago
  Yeah this wasn't too bad and it was what I used to do back in the day with Notepad++. By the time you hit save in your editor, your changes were ready to be reloaded in the browser. With SAM we're talking ~6-7 seconds with an SSD to build + LOCALLY invoke a new copy of a fairly simple function where you're changing 1 line of code, and you need to do this every time you change your code. That's even with creating a custom Makefile command to roll up the build + invoke into 1 human action. The wait time is purely waiting for SAM to do what it needs to do. With a more traditional non-Serverless set up, with or without Docker (using volumes) the turn around time is effectively instant. You can make your code change and by the time you reload your browser it's all good to go. This is speaking from a Python, Ruby, Elixir and Node POV.
  - iCarrot 6y ago
    The workaround my team uses is to make two entries to start the webapp: one for SAM, one for local. For fast iteration we just `npm start`, and when we're ready to do more elaborated testing we run with SAM. This works pretty well so far.
nicky0 6y ago
Out of genuine interest... is there a modern solution to this problem with PHP/MySQL? (I'm still doing the "upload to server to test" thing.... I've tried MAMP and Vagrant/VirtualBox for local dev but both of them seem horribly complex compared to what we can do with local dev with node.js/mongo and so on.)
- dpacmittal 6y ago
  Php has an inbuilt server you can run with `php -s`
- OriPekelman 6y ago
  try https://lando.dev/ https://lando.dev/ uses docker under the hood... but simplifies it all to the extreme.
- pantelisk 6y ago
  "docker-compose up" and your OS, codebase, dependecies and data is up and running locally in the exposed local port of your preference. You can even split parts in different layers to mimic a services/cross-region logic. Of course this won't fix the fact that you have a lambda behind api gateway that does some heic->jpg conversion and can't be hit outside the DMZ, or some esoteric SQS queue that you can't mimmic locally - but it should get you almost there.
  - methodin 6y ago
    FWIW I haven't hit any scenario out of the basic services that localstack couldn't run locally. I even have it executing Terraform on localstack as if it was AWS (without IAM which is indeed a problem when I forget to create/update policies)!
  - bernawil 6y ago
    and there's localstack for those cases.
  - mtnGoat 6y ago
    this doesnt solve the OPs problems though, if Vagrant is complex, so would be a docker image. the problem is the user doesn't know how to manage/configure the underlying complexity of the OS and needed services, which would still be a problem if using docker. unless you find that perfect docker image with every dep you need... but that would also be true with vagrant.
coolg54321 6y ago
I think it was the other way around, you could just start wamp/mamp/xampp copy the file to public folder and everything just worked
olyjohn 6y ago
I'm not sure why that's PHP's fault? I never had problems running it locally... and to "get my code to the servers" was as easy as a git pull from the server which is probably the 2nd laziest way of accomplishing that.

kortilla 6y ago

It was actually pretty good if you had an IDE with sftp/scp support because you could save a file, refresh your browser, and have immediate new results.

nickjj 6y ago
Yeah this wasn't too bad and it was what I used to do back in the day with Notepad++. By the time you hit save in your editor, your changes were ready to be reloaded in the browser. With SAM we're talking ~6-7 seconds with an SSD to build + LOCALLY invoke a new copy of a fairly simple function where you're changing 1 line of code, and you need to do this every time you change your code. That's even with creating a custom Makefile command to roll up the build + invoke into 1 human action. The wait time is purely waiting for SAM to do what it needs to do. With a more traditional non-Serverless set up, with or without Docker (using volumes) the turn around time is effectively instant. You can make your code change and by the time you reload your browser it's all good to go. This is speaking from a Python, Ruby, Elixir and Node POV.
- iCarrot 6y ago
  The workaround my team uses is to make two entries to start the webapp: one for SAM, one for local. For fast iteration we just `npm start`, and when we're ready to do more elaborated testing we run with SAM. This works pretty well so far.

nicky0 6y ago

Out of genuine interest... is there a modern solution to this problem with PHP/MySQL? (I'm still doing the "upload to server to test" thing.... I've tried MAMP and Vagrant/VirtualBox for local dev but both of them seem horribly complex compared to what we can do with local dev with node.js/mongo and so on.)

dpacmittal 6y ago
Php has an inbuilt server you can run with `php -s`
OriPekelman 6y ago
try https://lando.dev/ https://lando.dev/ uses docker under the hood... but simplifies it all to the extreme.
pantelisk 6y ago
"docker-compose up" and your OS, codebase, dependecies and data is up and running locally in the exposed local port of your preference. You can even split parts in different layers to mimic a services/cross-region logic. Of course this won't fix the fact that you have a lambda behind api gateway that does some heic->jpg conversion and can't be hit outside the DMZ, or some esoteric SQS queue that you can't mimmic locally - but it should get you almost there.
- methodin 6y ago
  FWIW I haven't hit any scenario out of the basic services that localstack couldn't run locally. I even have it executing Terraform on localstack as if it was AWS (without IAM which is indeed a problem when I forget to create/update policies)!
- bernawil 6y ago
  and there's localstack for those cases.
- mtnGoat 6y ago
  this doesnt solve the OPs problems though, if Vagrant is complex, so would be a docker image. the problem is the user doesn't know how to manage/configure the underlying complexity of the OS and needed services, which would still be a problem if using docker. unless you find that perfect docker image with every dep you need... but that would also be true with vagrant.

coolg54321 6y ago

I think it was the other way around, you could just start wamp/mamp/xampp copy the file to public folder and everything just worked

olyjohn 6y ago

I'm not sure why that's PHP's fault? I never had problems running it locally... and to "get my code to the servers" was as easy as a git pull from the server which is probably the 2nd laziest way of accomplishing that.