4 ms·

I really love Elixir (and somewhat Erlang) and all the mental models and how developing in the ecosystem feels like, especially with phoenix/liveview. Having s

I really love Elixir (and somewhat Erlang) and all the mental models and how developing in the ecosystem feels like, especially with phoenix/liveview. Having said that, nowadays anything that can't really run on AWS Lambda is a nonstarter in any company tech discussions, no matter how cool/productive it is. The operational benefits of serverless are simply too great especially when trying to scale up.

dgb23 4y ago
I don’t quite understand this. Doesn’t the BEAM runtime also have operational benefits over “lambdas”? Also not every application or component thereof wants stateless servers? What about live collaboration, game servers or just generally holding stuff in memory for perf reasons.
- mikl 4y ago
  Yeah, one could easily argue the opposite: The excellent scaling characteristics of the BEAM means that there’s no need to use extreme performance compromises like AWS Lambda. You can scale an Erlang or Elixir application extremely far by just giving it more compute resources.
dmpk2k 4y ago
You are vastly overestimating the importance of AWS Lambda, even in web tech circles.
MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
This has it backwards - lambda is only suitable for the cloud equivalent of shell scripts, anything more complex and it becomes an unmaintainable rats nest that cannot be debugged.
- bongobingo1 4y ago
  Just hook up Amazon™®© X™®©-Ray™®© into Amazon™®© Redshift™®© then use Amazon™®© Athena™®©! Simple!
  - MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
    We should not have to live like this.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      No one has to, there are 1000s of alternatives but some people chose to. Don't ask me why.
      - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
        I, in fact, use Elixir serverless: I just send functions to my BEAM and it runs them for me.
        bongobingo1 4y ago
        I know (think) you're half joking, but I wonder if you could abuse the hot-reload system to injected your function (assuming you don't want to eval strings) into some "lambda" module and run it.
seper8 4y ago
Stop it Jeff...
sho 4y ago
...what? The 99.999% of tech that does not, in fact, run (or would want to run) on friggin' AWS lambdas would like to have a quiet word with you.
Vosporos 4y ago
Time to go outside and touch grass.
ThimbleWeed 4y ago
I thought around 80% of big tech companies are still maintaining giant Java monoliths that are attached to a giant Oracle database that nobody understands. Because it was all written 20 years ago, and there's no money in completely changing the architecture. I've never been able to use serverless at work. I've always wanted to, but it's too risky for most companies. In my experience, they prefer to stick to tried and tested methods that have an easily predictable budget.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > I thought around 80% of big tech companies are still maintaining giant Java monoliths that are attached to a giant Oracle database that nobody understands. I may or may not know lots of people who even develop new systems that way. In part due to them not knowing better, in part due to it being an okay fit for the problem that they want to solve and in part because they haven't and won't be fired for picking what has historically been a "safe" option. More people have probably gotten burnt in the process of developing microservices and failing at it, than have been by their monoliths rotting over time and failing to scale, unless it's in an org with a strong ops culture and the support to do microservices right (with all of the tooling, like service meshes, tracing, orchestration and so on). I reckon that many out there have done nor microservices, nor serverless, nor have any interest to. They're just the silent majority: https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/the-silent-majority/ https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/the-silent-majority/
conradfr 4y ago
Well I remember this announcement [0] and there was this [1] but I'm not sure that went anywhere. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/fr/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-use-any-programming-language-and-share-common-components/ https://aws.amazon.com/fr/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-use-a... [1] https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-lambda-elixir-runtime https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-lambda-elixir-runtime
holsee 4y ago
I've run plenty of things in AWS Lamba using Erlang FWIW. https://github.com/alertlogic/erllambda https://github.com/alertlogic/erllambda It is interesting in as much as the lambda functions stay hot for a period of time.

dgb23 4y ago

I don’t quite understand this. Doesn’t the BEAM runtime also have operational benefits over “lambdas”? Also not every application or component thereof wants stateless servers? What about live collaboration, game servers or just generally holding stuff in memory for perf reasons.

mikl 4y ago
Yeah, one could easily argue the opposite: The excellent scaling characteristics of the BEAM means that there’s no need to use extreme performance compromises like AWS Lambda. You can scale an Erlang or Elixir application extremely far by just giving it more compute resources.

dmpk2k 4y ago

You are vastly overestimating the importance of AWS Lambda, even in web tech circles.

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago

This has it backwards - lambda is only suitable for the cloud equivalent of shell scripts, anything more complex and it becomes an unmaintainable rats nest that cannot be debugged.

bongobingo1 4y ago
Just hook up Amazon™®© X™®©-Ray™®© into Amazon™®© Redshift™®© then use Amazon™®© Athena™®©! Simple!
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  We should not have to live like this.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    No one has to, there are 1000s of alternatives but some people chose to. Don't ask me why.
    - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
      I, in fact, use Elixir serverless: I just send functions to my BEAM and it runs them for me.
      - bongobingo1 4y ago
        I know (think) you're half joking, but I wonder if you could abuse the hot-reload system to injected your function (assuming you don't want to eval strings) into some "lambda" module and run it.

seper8 4y ago

Stop it Jeff...

sho 4y ago

...what? The 99.999% of tech that does not, in fact, run (or would want to run) on friggin' AWS lambdas would like to have a quiet word with you.

Vosporos 4y ago

Time to go outside and touch grass.

ThimbleWeed 4y ago

I thought around 80% of big tech companies are still maintaining giant Java monoliths that are attached to a giant Oracle database that nobody understands. Because it was all written 20 years ago, and there's no money in completely changing the architecture. I've never been able to use serverless at work. I've always wanted to, but it's too risky for most companies. In my experience, they prefer to stick to tried and tested methods that have an easily predictable budget.

KronisLV 4y ago
> I thought around 80% of big tech companies are still maintaining giant Java monoliths that are attached to a giant Oracle database that nobody understands. I may or may not know lots of people who even develop new systems that way. In part due to them not knowing better, in part due to it being an okay fit for the problem that they want to solve and in part because they haven't and won't be fired for picking what has historically been a "safe" option. More people have probably gotten burnt in the process of developing microservices and failing at it, than have been by their monoliths rotting over time and failing to scale, unless it's in an org with a strong ops culture and the support to do microservices right (with all of the tooling, like service meshes, tracing, orchestration and so on). I reckon that many out there have done nor microservices, nor serverless, nor have any interest to. They're just the silent majority: https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/the-silent-majority/ https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/the-silent-majority/

conradfr 4y ago

Well I remember this announcement [0] and there was this [1] but I'm not sure that went anywhere. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/fr/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-use-any-programming-language-and-share-common-components/ https://aws.amazon.com/fr/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-use-a... [1] https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-lambda-elixir-runtime https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-lambda-elixir-runtime

holsee 4y ago

I've run plenty of things in AWS Lamba using Erlang FWIW. https://github.com/alertlogic/erllambda https://github.com/alertlogic/erllambda It is interesting in as much as the lambda functions stay hot for a period of time.