Microservices without the Servers

This is Amazon's wet dream. Your app isn't an app at all, it's just a collection of configs on the AWS Console. When and if the time comes to migrate off of AWS, you realize you don't actually have an app to migrate.

Interesting that the article talks about load tests but omits any results.<p>I was trying out a Gateway API + Lambda + DynamoDB setup in the hope that it would be a highly scalable data capture solution.<p>Sadly the marketing doesn&#x27;t match the reality. The performance both in terms of reqs&#x2F;sec and response time were pretty poor.<p>At 20 reqs&#x2F;sec - no errors and majority of response times around 300ms<p>At 45 reqs&#x2F;sec - 40% of responses took more than 1200ms, min request time was ~350ms<p>At 50 reqs&#x2F;sec - v slow response times, lots of SSL handshake timeout errors. I think requests were throttled by Lambda but I would expect a 429 response as per the docs rather than SSL errors.<p>My hope was that Lambda would spin up more functions as demand increased, but if you read the FAQs carefully it looks as though there are default limits. You can ask these to be changed but that doesn&#x27;t make scaling very realtime.

I see a lot of people disagreeing with the overall direction of &quot;less servers, more services&quot;. I totally get it, I used to be one of those people, but I think the shift to &quot;less hassle development&quot; is inevitable.<p>5 years ago people used to debate whether we should use a virtualized server vs. a physical one. You still can see similar discussions but rarely - we all have more or less agreed that using AWS&#x2F;Rackspace&#x2F;etc. is good for a business in majority of use cases.<p>I think 5 years from now we&#x27;ll still be debating servers vs. services, but the prevailing wisdom will be that &quot;services&quot; have won.

It is pretty cool but not really serverless, you are still handling http requests via Amazon API gateway and in general you are relying and paying for quite a lot of Amazon services. Not sure how much better this approach is to serving image magic via PHP for example, it would be good to see some numbers.

Are servers really that hard to manage these days? This seems like way more work and pretty limited in what it can really do, especially compared to a few lines of code in any decent web framework that can perform a lot faster.

&quot;Microservices without the Servers: the Uberization of IaaS as PaaS for SaaS&quot;<p>Like when you say you have no carbon footprint because you don&#x27;t own a car, even though you call a taxi every time you want to go somewhere?<p>Are microservices different from SOA? Or is it just a more modern, streamlined buzzword?<p>You say &quot;microservices,&quot; but all I see is &quot;omg, you realize inter-node latency isn&#x27;t a trivial component to ignore when building interactive services, right?&quot;

Here&#x27;s how I deploy code, without having to modify it:<p><pre><code> cf push myapp </code></pre> It figures out the language&#x2F;runtime I&#x27;m using (Java, Ruby, Go, NodeJS, PHP), builds the code with a buildpack, then hands it off to a cloud controller which places it in a container. My code gets wired to traffic routing, log collection and injected services. I can deploy a 600Mb Java blockbuster using 8Gb of RAM per instance or I can push a 400kb Go app that needs 8Mb of RAM per instance.<p>I don&#x27;t need to read special documentation, I don&#x27;t need special Java annotations.<p>I just push. <i>And it just works.</i><p>I&#x27;m talking about Cloud Foundry. It runs on AWS. And vSphere. And OpenStack. It&#x27;s opensource and doesn&#x27;t tie you to a single vendor or cloud forever.<p>I worked on it for a while, in the buildpacks team, so I&#x27;m a one-eyed fan.<p>Seriously: why are we still talking about devops? <i>It&#x27;s a solved problem</i>. Use Heroku. Install Cloud Foundry. Install OpenShift. And get back to focusing on user value, not tinkering.<p>Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal Labs, part of Pivotal, which donates the largest amount of engineering effort on Cloud Foundry (followed by IBM).

I&#x27;m playing with these exact things now and it is very enjoyable so far.<p>My main worry is not on the technical side but on how things are charged for. If I build something that starts to get used I am covered in terms of scalability, but not in a way that protects me from &#x27;cost scalability&#x27; so to speak. I know I can set up billing alerts and hit a big &#x27;shutdown&#x27; button in response to high load, but what I don&#x27;t think I can do is throttle these services based on the money I want to budget&#x2F;spend. With my own services I have a hard cost limit, with a hard scalability limit, or rather I just accept that my response times will go down or fail once I&#x27;ve allocated all I can afford.<p>If there something for AWS in terms of &#x27;cost throttling&#x27;? It may be a gap in their services, especially for people want to build things that might get traction?

Great to see Lambda stepping up their serverless game. We&#x27;re big fans of this approach and are hacking on something similar to this at StackHut[1], but:<p>* Mostly OSS to avoid lock-in<p>* Git integration<p>* Full stack specification (OS, dependencies, etc.)<p>* Python&#x2F;ES6 support (Ruby and PHP coming)<p>* Client libs so you can call your functions &#x27;natively&#x27; in other languages.<p>It would be awesome to hear what people would like us to build for them. Here is a blog-post on how to build a PDF -&gt; image converter: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.stackhut.com&#x2F;it-was-meant-to-be&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.stackhut.com&#x2F;it-was-meant-to-be&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackhut.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackhut.com</a>

The current problem with this architecture is the network cannot be used as a security layer. Databases, search engines, etc need ports opened to the public rather than to selected servers.

Awesome, right up until you need a feature they don&#x27;t want to offer, or they decide to sunset a feature you&#x27;re the only one using, and you have absolutely 0 control over it.

Lamda does not work inside a vpc nor can it connect to one. You cannot use RDS period. This severly limits options currently available from a database and security perspective.

Too much vendor lock in. Will keep my VMs thanks.

I came here expecting to read about &quot;distributed computing in the peer to peer network&quot; and instead found a how-to for &quot;servers-as-a-service&quot; from Amazon.<p>Check this out instead:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crowdprocess.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crowdprocess.com&#x2F;</a>

Folks interested in this might like to know that ContainerCon also had a session on Containers and Unikernels. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sched.co&#x2F;3YUJ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sched.co&#x2F;3YUJ</a><p>A write up and audio from that session is also available.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;the-comparison-and-context-of-unikernels-and-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;the-comparison-and-context-of-unikerne...</a>

This is a misleading title. Managed cloud services run on servers. There has to be a better title. For a moment I thought they were proposing P2P hosting.

This article only makes sense if you don&#x27;t know what servers are, and believe &quot;the cloud&quot; doesn&#x27;t use them.

Beware, link-bait! Title should really be &quot;Microservices without non-Amazon Services&quot;, which if you remove the double negate really says &quot;Microservices with Amazon Services&quot;, which is well.. not that interesting IMO. I&#x27;d rather write against CloudFoundry which abstract away AWS.

I built <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vat.landedcost.avalara.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vat.landedcost.avalara.com&#x2F;</a> using this same architecture pattern.<p>The site is served up via S3, and the back-end logic is a Lambda module that wraps a SOAP API.

I made a pretty cool lambda this week converting using mandrill inbound email api, processing this through lambda, then posting it to my redmine docker server. After a lot of fiddling (lambdas doesnt support x-www-form-urlencoded) it now works great.

Is there a particular reason why Amazon chose JavaScript? I&#x27;m seeing more and more PAAS services going nodejs first&#x2F;only and am wondering if there&#x27;s an underlying reason.

I was thinking... How can you use server less webapp with SEO-friendly dynamic url structure, e.g. Ecommerce, social network, etc. does anyone have an idea on that?