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> Early in cloud computing, virtual machines were the compute abstraction […] This is funny to me because serverless sounds to me like the return of PHP (etc)
by TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
> Early in cloud computing, virtual machines were the compute abstraction […]
This is funny to me because serverless sounds to me like the return of PHP (etc) shared hosting. What's old is new again?
- brtkdotse 4y agoIt’s amusing to see a whole generation of senior developers (“senior” as in 5+ years of experience) that haven’t experienced web development without React[0] and who proceed to reinvent PHP/ASP.NET/RoR. [0] Used here as shorthand for “modern js driven development”
- efdee 4y agoWe could really do without this kind of snark here. Not only is it condescending, but it's also just plain wrong, either on purpose or due to the writer not being familiar with the subject at hand.
- dntrkv 4y agoSuch a tiring take... Nobody is reinventing PHP or RoR development. What is happening is the community taking all our favorite parts of these stacks and combining and implementing them in ways that facilitate a dev experience that we could only have dreamed of back in the PHP/RoR days. - Senior dev that started off in the PHP and then RoR days
- edgyquant 4y agoYep totally agree with this. - Engineering Lead who got his start in PHP/ASP(pre .net) and loves the modern ecosystem despite its flaws
- manigandham 4y agoBack in RoR days? It's still here with new releases offering modern features. ASP.NET is even more cutting edge.
- jacobr 4y agoAnother developer here who’s been around for the tech you mention. The evolution has been 2 steps forward but 1 step back. It’s how many complex systems evolve and it’s fine. Just because you see that some problems/solutions resemble what you saw 10 years ago doesn’t mean nothing was improved along the way.
- nonethewiser 4y agoYou seem to be suggesting the Deno team has <= 5 years experience. Else, who is recreating PHP/ASP.NET/RoR?
- dgb23 4y agoPersonally I've been using both PHP and Node/React extensively and let me tell you there are very good reasons for the React/Node/JS ecosystem to exist and they are decidedly not borne out of ignorance of the PHP ecosystem. Ryan Dahl (inventor of Node and Deno) said that he created (paraphrasing) "the PHP of this generation" and React was invented within the probably the largest PHP shop to date. PHP is an unsafe, slow by default (execution model - the language itself fast), hard to use well, clunky, limiting and bloated language that is kept together by duct tape and the incredible effort and ingenuity of it's open source community by educating developers and improving/cleaning up the language at full blast, unfortunately often by breaking backwards compatibility. Whether JS (including Deno) is a good alternative or the right answer is up for debate. But people who try to mimic some of the benefits of PHP in the JS ecosystem are not doing so accidentally or because of lack of experience.
- christophilus 4y agoBeen writing web stuff since before the dot-com bust. Preact + TypeScript is probably my favorite front-end programming combo yet. I liked VB6 and C# WinForms, though, so maybe I’m an invalid sample.
- HideousKojima 4y agoC# WinForms was super comfy for when you just wanted to throw together some simple GUI tool for internal use. As powerful as WPF and similar frameworks are they definitely lose to WinForms in ease of use.
- manigandham 4y agoWebForms was WinForms for the web and for all the criticism it got, it was amazingly productive. The new Blazor framework is finally approaching that speed of development again.
- vkou 4y agoRe-inventing PHP but with less of the garbage that is PHP isn't a bad thing.
- thegeomaster 4y agoI changed my view on this―I hated how things were going full circle. But in reality, human civilization loves overdoing a particular direction and then reverts to the mean. You see this with the economy, moral fashions, everything. I am an optimist in that I (have started to) believe that this slowly allows us to converge on better solutions for everything. PHP was easy to set up, easy to host, easy to understand and easy to build stuff with, but it resulted in an unmaintainable mess over the long run. Then Node was all of that, but JS was a better language than PHP. Then Node grew warts in the form of the clutter that is npm, then it grew complex build systems and unstable libraries. Now there's Deno. It uses TypeScript by default, which is a surprisingly useful and productive language, it rethinks some things, it's much more secure by default, and now we're back at the PHP-level easiness to host using Deno Deploy. We've ended up with an overall better solution and it only took us 20 years :)
- speed_spread 4y agoWe didn't go back far enough, CGI is still where it's at.
- scarface74 4y agoVirtual machines are still the abstraction. Each Lambda/Fargate (serverless Docker) runs in its own VM.
- seabrookmx 4y agoBut it's a "micro" VM now .. rolls eyes
- nl 4y agoLambda and most similar technologies use variants of containers, not VMs. Outside HN that distinction might not be important. Here being pedantically correct does matter on this because the VM abstraction has been around for a long time, whereas containers were an enabling technology for serverless. And containers and the fast startup, security and resource consumption guarantees they offer is a big difference to the old days of shared PHP hosting. And this is why "reinvention" with new technology is different.
- scarface74 4y agoLambda and Fargate use the Firecracker VM https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/ https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/ Firecracker is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that uses the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to create and manage microVMs. Firecracker has a minimalist design. It excludes unnecessary devices and guest functionality to reduce the memory footprint and attack surface area of each microVM “How AWS’s Firecracker Virtual Machines work” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BIRv2FnHJAg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BIRv2FnHJAg The Lambda service team always emphasizes the level of isolation that Firecracker VMs gives you that containers don’t.
- yencabulator 4y agoAnd Google Cloud Run use gVisor, which is also not a container.
- mwcampbell 4y agoIt's worse this time, in that the old shared hosting environments (e.g. Apache with FastCGI and suexec, or nginx with fpm) were open source, and there were countless shared hosts. The new generation of multi-tenant isolate-based JS runtimes are proprietary, and AFAIK one can count the number of hosts on one hand.
- bb010g 4y agoYou can self-host Cloudflare Workers. https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare https://github.com/cloudflare/miniflare
- no_wizard 4y agoThis is very much specifically a developer and testing tool, not a robust runtime that is at all akin to self hosting Cloudflare Workers
- kentonv 4y agoFWIW, we'll be open sourcing the real thing in a couple months (I'm actively working on the necessary refactoring as we speak...). https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1523666343412654081 https://twitter.com/KentonVarda/status/1523666343412654081
- gabrielizaias 4y ago> The new generation of multi-tenant isolate-based JS runtimes are proprietary That's being addressed by the new Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group https://wintercg.org/ https://wintercg.org/, driven by Deno and others.
- leodriesch 4y agoThis strives to standardize the runtimes and standard library surface but not the runtime orchestration, networking or other aspects.
- ascorbic 4y agoAnyone who has had to maintain a shared PHP server would say that's very different. I used PHP for years, and now use serverless functions (both Lambda and Deno). Serverless means you don't need to worry about anything except the code. It scales automatically. It never needs updating. It doesn't go down in the middle of the night. It can roll back deploys instantly. Sure, you could pay for managed hosting, and then pay more for scaling, and set up automation for deploys, but give me serverless functions any day of the week. They just work.
- tomcam 4y agoWhat’s the SQL story? SQLite, or is PostgreSQL fast enough on startup?
- ascorbic 4y agoYou don't run the database itself there, you connect to it remotely. I've not had a chance to try them yet, but PlanetScale Portals look like a great solution there. https://planetscale.com/blog/introducing-planetscale-portals-read-only-regions https://planetscale.com/blog/introducing-planetscale-portals...
- tomcam 4y agoOk I was too little literal-minded about the functions concept. Thank you