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Author here. I’m excited to get this out and happy to answer any questions. Hopefully I sufficiently nerd sniped some folks to implement the FLAME pattern in js

Author here. I’m excited to get this out and happy to answer any questions. Hopefully I sufficiently nerd sniped some folks to implement the FLAME pattern in js , go, and other langs :)

ryanjshaw 3y ago
This looks great. Hopefully Microsoft are paying attention because Azure Functions are way too complicated to secure and deploy, and have weird assumptions about what kind of code you want to run.
- bbkane 3y ago
  I had a lot of problems trying to set up Azure Functions with Terraform a couple of years ago. Wonder if it's gotten better? https://www.bbkane.com/blog/azure-functions-with-terraform/ https://www.bbkane.com/blog/azure-functions-with-terraform/
  - orochimaaru 3y ago
    I used them with Python. Simple enough but opinionated. I didn’t play around with durable functions. Don’t have strong feelings there. It worked. I did have some issues with upgrading the functions but found the work arounds.
- bob1029 3y ago
  > weird assumptions about what kind of code you want to run Those "weird assumptions" are what makes the experience wonderful for the happy path. If you use the C#/v4 model, I can't imagine you'd have a hard time. Azure even sets up the CI/CD for you automatically if your functions are hosted in Github. If your functions need to talk to SQL, you should be using Managed Identity authentication between these resources. We don't have any shared secrets in our connection strings today. We use Microsoft Auth to authenticate access to our HttpTrigger functions. We take a dep on IClaimsPrincipal right in the request and everything we need to know about the user's claims is trivially available. I have zero experience using Azure Functions outside of the walled garden. If you are trying to deploy python or rust to Az Functions, I can imagine things wouldn't be as smooth. Especially, as you get into things like tracing, Application Insights, etc. I feel like you should only use Microsoft tech if you intend to drink a large amount of their koolaid. The moment you start using their tooling with non C#/.NET stacks, things go a bit sideways. You might be better off in a different cloud if you want to use their FaaS runners in a more "open" way. If you can figure out how to dose yourself appropriately with M$ tech, I'd argue the dev experience is unbeatable. Much of the Microsoft hate looks to me like a stick-in-bike-wheels meme. You can't dunk on the experience until you've tried the one the chef actually intended. Dissecting your burger and only eating a bit of the lettuce is not a thorough review of the cuisine on offer.
  - jorams 3y ago
    > You can't dunk on the experience until you've tried the one the chef actually intended. Dissecting your burger and only eating a bit of the lettuce is not a thorough review of the cuisine on offer. But Microsoft isn't selling burgers that people are taking a bit of lettuce from. They're selling lettuce, and if that lettuce sucks in any context that isn't the burger that they're also selling, then complaining about the quality of their lettuce is valid.
  - jabradoodle 3y ago
    A cloud vendor where using some of the most popular languages in the world makes your life harder is a genuine reason to dislike something.
  - devjab 3y ago
    Have you used azure functions in an enterprise setting? Because it’s a terrible experience. I think our “best” issue is how sometimes our functions won’t be capable of connecting to their container registry. For no apparent reason. We have an Entra ID group that has Arc Pull access and we add new function slot identities to it automatically, and for the most part it works fine, but then suddenly it won’t. We currently has a pipeline slot, that is completely the same as the four other slots, which will only deploy a new function version if you deploy it twice through the Azure pipeline. We’ve had Microsoft look at it and their suggestion was to delete the pipeline and create it again. And that’s just part of it. Then comes the VNETs, the subnets the private endpoints and how both subscriptions and resource groups make everything a tiny battle. I don’t really mind that much, we’re abandoning it in favour of Azure Container Apps and a fully run Bicep + Dapr pipeline and we’re never looking back. Though, to be fair to Microsoft, the way they designed Azure Functions makes the migration away from them really, really, easy. Which is frankly a brilliant design for the more managed side of “serverless” in my opinions. It’s just a shame that the managed part just doesn’t work very well. The functions themselves work fine, well maybe not if you don’t use .net in isolation, but I can’t speak about that as we weren’t going to trust Microsoft to update our dependencies (even if they are Microsoft SDKs).
- kapilvt 3y ago
  azure functions don't fit common definition of serverless, I've had a few convos with them over several years.. but there is really a mismatch owing to the original origin at azure, and real lack of understanding of the space, ie origin is as built on top of web apps.. ie.. azure functions is built on a hack for to try and enter the marketing in the serverless space at its origins. how many websites do you need to run... ie you can't run more than 50 functions, or the 16 cell table on different runtime options (ie. provision servers for your server less)... consumption is better, but the origins in web apps means its just a different product.. hey every function has a url by default :shrug: azure needs a radical rethink of what serverless is, I haven't seen any evidence they got the memo. in aws, lambda originated out of s3, re bring compute to storage.
danielskogly 3y ago
Great article and video, and very exciting concept! Looking forward to a JS implementation, but that looks like a challenge to get done. And now I feel (a tiny bit) bad for sniping ffmpeg.fly.dev :)
tlivolsi 3y ago
On an unrelated note, what syntax highlighting theme did you use for the code? I love it.
matthewcford 3y ago
Can you run your app on a smaller vm but boot a larger one ok demand? I'm thinking bumblebee etc
Ironchefpython 3y ago
I feel like the most natural implementation would be something like vert.x for the jvm. They already have the mechanisms to handle async execution (via reactive extensions and futures and coroutines on top of the event bus) and serialization and distribution of data across a cluster. There are eventbus clients for many popular languages as well, so you'd be able to build your application in a mix of languages.
berniedurfee 3y ago
I’d encourage you to temper the hyperbole. It’s easy to dismiss these types of articles as straight sales pitches when the problem is presented as “…a fate worse than death.” and the solution so easy and painless, you’d be a fool not to dismiss any other approach! Thats the MO of snake oil sellers. Instead, I think a more objective comparison with much less editorializing would be less of a turn off for folks curious about a better approach to solve a problem that you did well in outlining at the beginning of the article. Hopefully you take this as constructive feedback! I think the substance of the article is interesting, I was just turned off by the presentation.
- pas 3y ago
  I especially liked that like. There's always a bit of space for comedy.
benoror 3y ago
How is this fundamentally different from how something like Sidekiq instantiates a Rails codebase to run background jobs?

Author here. I’m excited to get this out and happy to answer any questions. Hopefully I sufficiently nerd sniped some folks to implement the FLAME pattern in js , go, and other langs :)

ryanjshaw 3y ago

This looks great. Hopefully Microsoft are paying attention because Azure Functions are way too complicated to secure and deploy, and have weird assumptions about what kind of code you want to run.

bbkane 3y ago
I had a lot of problems trying to set up Azure Functions with Terraform a couple of years ago. Wonder if it's gotten better? https://www.bbkane.com/blog/azure-functions-with-terraform/ https://www.bbkane.com/blog/azure-functions-with-terraform/
- orochimaaru 3y ago
  I used them with Python. Simple enough but opinionated. I didn’t play around with durable functions. Don’t have strong feelings there. It worked. I did have some issues with upgrading the functions but found the work arounds.
bob1029 3y ago
> weird assumptions about what kind of code you want to run Those "weird assumptions" are what makes the experience wonderful for the happy path. If you use the C#/v4 model, I can't imagine you'd have a hard time. Azure even sets up the CI/CD for you automatically if your functions are hosted in Github. If your functions need to talk to SQL, you should be using Managed Identity authentication between these resources. We don't have any shared secrets in our connection strings today. We use Microsoft Auth to authenticate access to our HttpTrigger functions. We take a dep on IClaimsPrincipal right in the request and everything we need to know about the user's claims is trivially available. I have zero experience using Azure Functions outside of the walled garden. If you are trying to deploy python or rust to Az Functions, I can imagine things wouldn't be as smooth. Especially, as you get into things like tracing, Application Insights, etc. I feel like you should only use Microsoft tech if you intend to drink a large amount of their koolaid. The moment you start using their tooling with non C#/.NET stacks, things go a bit sideways. You might be better off in a different cloud if you want to use their FaaS runners in a more "open" way. If you can figure out how to dose yourself appropriately with M$ tech, I'd argue the dev experience is unbeatable. Much of the Microsoft hate looks to me like a stick-in-bike-wheels meme. You can't dunk on the experience until you've tried the one the chef actually intended. Dissecting your burger and only eating a bit of the lettuce is not a thorough review of the cuisine on offer.
- jorams 3y ago
  > You can't dunk on the experience until you've tried the one the chef actually intended. Dissecting your burger and only eating a bit of the lettuce is not a thorough review of the cuisine on offer. But Microsoft isn't selling burgers that people are taking a bit of lettuce from. They're selling lettuce, and if that lettuce sucks in any context that isn't the burger that they're also selling, then complaining about the quality of their lettuce is valid.
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  A cloud vendor where using some of the most popular languages in the world makes your life harder is a genuine reason to dislike something.
- devjab 3y ago
  Have you used azure functions in an enterprise setting? Because it’s a terrible experience. I think our “best” issue is how sometimes our functions won’t be capable of connecting to their container registry. For no apparent reason. We have an Entra ID group that has Arc Pull access and we add new function slot identities to it automatically, and for the most part it works fine, but then suddenly it won’t. We currently has a pipeline slot, that is completely the same as the four other slots, which will only deploy a new function version if you deploy it twice through the Azure pipeline. We’ve had Microsoft look at it and their suggestion was to delete the pipeline and create it again. And that’s just part of it. Then comes the VNETs, the subnets the private endpoints and how both subscriptions and resource groups make everything a tiny battle. I don’t really mind that much, we’re abandoning it in favour of Azure Container Apps and a fully run Bicep + Dapr pipeline and we’re never looking back. Though, to be fair to Microsoft, the way they designed Azure Functions makes the migration away from them really, really, easy. Which is frankly a brilliant design for the more managed side of “serverless” in my opinions. It’s just a shame that the managed part just doesn’t work very well. The functions themselves work fine, well maybe not if you don’t use .net in isolation, but I can’t speak about that as we weren’t going to trust Microsoft to update our dependencies (even if they are Microsoft SDKs).
kapilvt 3y ago
azure functions don't fit common definition of serverless, I've had a few convos with them over several years.. but there is really a mismatch owing to the original origin at azure, and real lack of understanding of the space, ie origin is as built on top of web apps.. ie.. azure functions is built on a hack for to try and enter the marketing in the serverless space at its origins. how many websites do you need to run... ie you can't run more than 50 functions, or the 16 cell table on different runtime options (ie. provision servers for your server less)... consumption is better, but the origins in web apps means its just a different product.. hey every function has a url by default :shrug: azure needs a radical rethink of what serverless is, I haven't seen any evidence they got the memo. in aws, lambda originated out of s3, re bring compute to storage.

danielskogly 3y ago

Great article and video, and very exciting concept! Looking forward to a JS implementation, but that looks like a challenge to get done. And now I feel (a tiny bit) bad for sniping ffmpeg.fly.dev :)

tlivolsi 3y ago

On an unrelated note, what syntax highlighting theme did you use for the code? I love it.

matthewcford 3y ago

Can you run your app on a smaller vm but boot a larger one ok demand? I'm thinking bumblebee etc

Ironchefpython 3y ago

I feel like the most natural implementation would be something like vert.x for the jvm. They already have the mechanisms to handle async execution (via reactive extensions and futures and coroutines on top of the event bus) and serialization and distribution of data across a cluster. There are eventbus clients for many popular languages as well, so you'd be able to build your application in a mix of languages.

berniedurfee 3y ago

I’d encourage you to temper the hyperbole. It’s easy to dismiss these types of articles as straight sales pitches when the problem is presented as “…a fate worse than death.” and the solution so easy and painless, you’d be a fool not to dismiss any other approach! Thats the MO of snake oil sellers. Instead, I think a more objective comparison with much less editorializing would be less of a turn off for folks curious about a better approach to solve a problem that you did well in outlining at the beginning of the article. Hopefully you take this as constructive feedback! I think the substance of the article is interesting, I was just turned off by the presentation.

pas 3y ago
I especially liked that like. There's always a bit of space for comedy.

benoror 3y ago

How is this fundamentally different from how something like Sidekiq instantiates a Rails codebase to run background jobs?