3 ms·
As the other commenter points out, this offering isn't quite comparable to Lambda directly. This ends up comparing apples to oranges here and there, but overall
by voiceblue 3y ago
As the other commenter points out, this offering isn't quite comparable to Lambda directly. This ends up comparing apples to oranges here and there, but overall I was able to get a good idea of the choices made and the tradeoffs involved. Nice work! I do have a complaint about the comparison table that shows 'convert HTTP to function calls' as an alternative to load balancers and reverse proxies: as we see later in the article, there is still a load balancer involved, and that table creates a false impression that there isn't.
- ekzhang 3y ago(Author) Thanks for the feedback! Yes, there's still a network load balancer involved — we debated whether we should include the last section of the post but decided it's still worth writing out. The idea is that the load balancer doesn't need to directly connect to the running machines / containers, but instead just a much smaller set of `modal-http` service pods that translate HTTP to function calls, which lets us deploy and service big apps a lot faster. :) Writing a good network load balancer is very hard and we don't intend to suggest that it's our forte. We very much defer to all of the existing systems literature on this (and a couple papers like Maglev are in the post.)