3 ms·

Interesting design, but it seems viable only by exploiting "free" cacheing given to AWS lambda functions. There are no guarantees here from Amazon, and I'm pret

by tener 6y ago

Interesting design, but it seems viable only by exploiting "free" cacheing given to AWS lambda functions. There are no guarantees here from Amazon, and I'm pretty sure whatever free capacity is there right now would evaporate once people started to exploit it more. AWS lambda should be more convenient than manual scaling, but never cheaper than hand-optimized service implementation.

rossmohax 6y ago
For serverless to be viable, especially for languages like Java, instance reuse is really important, otherwise every call results in a cold start with unacceptable delays. So serverless provides can't really do much here. They could rise prices, but that will likely hinder adoption.
- wpietri 6y ago
  I suspect they could do a fair bit. An obvious thing is that they look for this pattern of behavior and turn up the speed with which they kill processes. They're still meeting their terms, and the normal Java users never notice. A more subtle thing is just to tune the lambda eviction code to be aware of profitability. The instances that get evicted first are the least profitable, the ones that have the worst ratio of billable to unbillable GB-miliseconds. Good customers get good performance. And the other ones say, "Gosh, cold starts are expensive; I'd better pay extra for provisioned concurrency."
  - jacobr1 6y ago
    I've been toying with the idea of using some form of memory suspension. The theoretic cost of a cold start them becomes just the time it takes to rematerialize the memory from disk. Has anyone seen anything similar out there that could be a starting point?
- giovannibonetti 6y ago
  Cloud Run could be what you are looking for (I'm not affiliated with it, just a regular costumer). https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/cloud-run-adds-min-instances-feature-for-latency-sensitive-apps https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/cloud-run-...

by tener 6y ago

rossmohax 6y ago

For serverless to be viable, especially for languages like Java, instance reuse is really important, otherwise every call results in a cold start with unacceptable delays. So serverless provides can't really do much here. They could rise prices, but that will likely hinder adoption.

wpietri 6y ago
I suspect they could do a fair bit. An obvious thing is that they look for this pattern of behavior and turn up the speed with which they kill processes. They're still meeting their terms, and the normal Java users never notice. A more subtle thing is just to tune the lambda eviction code to be aware of profitability. The instances that get evicted first are the least profitable, the ones that have the worst ratio of billable to unbillable GB-miliseconds. Good customers get good performance. And the other ones say, "Gosh, cold starts are expensive; I'd better pay extra for provisioned concurrency."
- jacobr1 6y ago
  I've been toying with the idea of using some form of memory suspension. The theoretic cost of a cold start them becomes just the time it takes to rematerialize the memory from disk. Has anyone seen anything similar out there that could be a starting point?
giovannibonetti 6y ago
Cloud Run could be what you are looking for (I'm not affiliated with it, just a regular costumer). https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/cloud-run-adds-min-instances-feature-for-latency-sensitive-apps https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/cloud-run-...