Since the relative growth rate formula requires dividing by the previous value and division by zero is undefined, the relative growth rate from 0 to 1 is undefined. However, I doubt VCs can do math, so the "infinite growth rate" strat may work.

@@lylyscuir unless you evaluate the limit instead of doing the division.

Based af

Just use js node -e "console.log((1 - 0) / 0)"

​@@MrTerribleLieExcept that limit doesn't exist

I do not understand why people are trying to replicate monolith applications in lambda.

@@disguysn SERVERLESS (Business loves this word)

Lambdas should never be in that hot path …

I have ran startups with over 100 million $ valuiation on aws lambdas, and our aws bill was under $20.

​@@-Jason-L need more words for this to add up

The business is expecting it to be done by Friday not it should have latency less than 200ms

@@ivonakis Those 200ms add up

@@tadghhenry technically inept management doesn't get this and devs just roll over and accept the status quo

4k ? Good times, I was on 1 mb Ram at the beginning, working the whole summer to get that beautiful Amiga 600 Ram edition

​@@tadghhenrydepends what the software is doing. Sometimes it matters but many times it does not. For some apps having a dev spend a couple of weeks optimising it costs more than you will save. For others performance is critical.

Yeah, it was strange that Prime totally missed it. Also: cloud providers are incetified to run their hardware as underclocked as possible.

@@Bokto1 Yeah, the only optimizations they benefit from is on hardware power consumption and cooling versus numbers on the dashboard. Since you're paying for CPU time and cores, they might as well move your code to 256 core arm chips running at 20w. Which is (or might be) good for the environment, but not for your pocket, when you need 50 cores to do the same job a quadcore system used to do.

He didn't miss it, it's just a child's understanding of the incentives involved. If you can't also list some incentives AWS has to care about performance you have no real understanding of their business.

This also applies for alot of PaaS offerings, such as Azure Logic Apps. You wanna pay 10x the money for every CPU-cycle? Look no further than Azure Logic Apps.

@@rapzid3536 Why don't you list two such incentives?

Also no matter how much you optimized there is a inherent perfomance hit that can't be optimized away by you and your paying for their inefficiencies.

@@farrongoth6712 I agree. It definitely limits you on options to optimize too, since you have to treat every request as an individual execution. There is some fancy stuff you can do with layers/extensions, but its still limited. I don't think serverless functions are bad, in fact I think they're a great tool. But, like everything, I think too many people are treating it as a silver bullet. There are definitely use cases for them, but I'm currently living the pain of going all serverless.

what is the reason to run this as lambda and not containsers? Seems like the amount of time you invested into making your code run cheaper could have been spent on setting up a k8s cluster, even with autoscaling if your traffic is variable

@@Qrzychu92with containers occasionally nodes can go down but lambda is very rare to fail

@@Qrzychu92 one example where I work is an overnight batch processing job. We have 16 hours every day where we need 0 instances and latency/startup is not a huge factor as it is not a customer facing service. Lambda makes it easy to simply maintain the python script used to process the data. No need to manage a kubernetes cluster just to run a script. With lambda we get the whole runtime provided for us. And devops is basically nonexistent because it just works. Assuming containers are always a better option is the equivalent of assuming serverless is always a better option. They're just two tools with two different sets of tradeoffs.

Never optimise too early. And if it's too late, you already made it.

Yes but we do need microservices in everything because it's the future! Everything needs to be infinitely scalable even if you have 0 users.

Indeed. I started my career long before the cloud and no-one cared about performance even back then. It was long forgotten after we got 8MB RAM.

My little company qualifies absolutely. We're so barebones and basic that the value of cloudy services that automate our workloads just completely stomps the cost of a few hundred lambda calls every other day.

I couldn't agree more. I have been leading migration of applications from these expensive cloud providers and CEOs get surprised at the cost saved. It is the economic downturn that had led some companies to realize how they have been taken advantage of.

It really depends on what your infrastructure requirements are. If high availability, local and regional accessibility, multiple redundant services, etc. are a must, services like AWS are actually quite cheap and affordable. AWS, for example, claims to offer 11 9's worth of availability, which would be monstrously expensive for a smaller or intermediate company to achieve. If we're analysing your setup, it's a single server with a single point of failure on the network. You might be able to safely run some web servers and a database on that, which is completely acceptable if your tolerance for downtime is around 2-7 days a year and you have your backups in order. But imagine adding redundant internet gateways, redundant ISP providers, electrical redundancy, redundant distribution and access switches, multiple hypervisors configured for HA, etc. The costs would easily run hundreds of thousands, even millions, and because of warranty issues these costs would be recurring every 5-10 years. Cloud providers are clearly a poor choice for smaller business entities and single developers, but claiming that using them is 'throwing away money' is quite asinine.

You're not buying servers. You're buying SLAs.

​@@connoisseurofcookies2047 All spot on... I love that you put numbers on some of the risks being accepted. I once worked for a company that sold 5 9s when the telco only promised 3 9s. Our customents management didn't know what it meant... our management didn't know what it meant. It have a few hours unscheduled downtime each month - no-one got sued. A lot of management get high on their own hype and sense of importance "2-7 days downtime? we have to be 5 9s" do you? do you really? do you know how much that would cost if we actually did that? Even Office365 being Office 363, no-one cares. BUT most s/w people don't understand that MTBF is "within the warranty pperiod" and believe their SSDs will be found fully working by archeologists - so let's not beat up on management too much. Paying for the whole buffet when you just want a bit of salad is foolish though!

If you were talking about renting VMs with ECS I'd agree but we're talking about lambda here. That's more like deciding to live in a restaurant. Heyyy you want a cherry on that sundae, just click your fingers and order it. Missing sprinkles? Just keep ordering. That's a company card you're using right? Don't worry about the bill sir.

@@Sonsequence That is why scale economy increases, then decreases... 🤣🤣🤣

@@Sonsequence Spot on. I used to be a solutions architect for AWS and majority of our customers start their footprint with one service to solve some critical business problem and then end up having most of their infrastructure on the cloud utilizing services they don't even need. We encourage our customers to adopt more and more services, exactly like your resturant analogy. and then when spending becomes a problem but they still want to use more services we issue EDP credits, free Proof of concept, etc.

@KiraIRL wow that's a gem bit of insider knowledge

Straight, no chaser, this is why Elixir matters.

Elixir is probably one of the best languages ever made

What is special about the Erlang VM?

@@majorhumbert676 “The Soul of Erlang and Elixir” by Sasa Juric is a great primer on what there is to love kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gNxyh5eJp8rThXk.htmlsi=tIpPXVbKgaqEIQjJ

@majorhumbert676 well, ill try to explain but is too much for a KZfaq comment, so as a summary is like a kubernetes in a box, it is like an OS, it has something like redis inside, is has pubsub, it has service discovery and consensus mechanism. All that is part of the standard library and available to the developer through simple elegant abstractions. I use Go at work and achieving all the functionality that the erlang VM has out of the box would require a monumental effort... raft, consul, kafka, etc. Is too much to explain in a short KZfaq comment.

I mean just look at what they’ve done with open source projects. Amazon doesn’t give a fuck because they have the money to do what they want I guess.

Think of the name Alexa lmao

@@kneelesh48 facking kew

Buckets of shit? 🪣💩 Maybe Bitbucket == Shitbucket?

I, um, I will now be using the phrase “boils my piss” as opposed to “grinds my gears” 😂

Never expected to see the Python import meme to show up here.

Yup, I had to stop watching after the python bit, it's rare to here so many incorrect things at once. Also, celery is not $&#&$@ threading.

...but that doesn't really matter as Python(cPython) doesn't at all support parrallelism....concurrency : yes.....parrallelism that would actually make that support for concurrency useful : no.

@@thecollector6746 That's just about as untrue as it meaningfully can be. First, the restriction on running threads only applies to threads holding the GIL. Numpy, OpenCV, and most libraries written on top of PyBind11 or similar don't hold the GIL while doing heavy computation. You can even run CUDA (or OpenCL) kernels fully async, without blocking the GIL. Second, python does support full parallelism as well as most javascript implementations do (WebWorkers), the restriction is data must be serializable and can only be shared by explicit message passing. It actually is ahead of javascript in that you can share sockets between peers, so if you want to handle orthogonal connections through the same listen port, it's trivial to do so. (Also, the subinterpreter system will let this resource sharing work within the same process, but that's a little ways off still). Third, concurrency is incredibly useful _without_ full parallelism. That's why python grew its concurrency model before multi-core CPUs existed outside enterprise environments. It lets you work on computations while waiting on data to load from spinning rust (or tapes). It lets you multiplex connections without needing to duplicate your stack per request. And it makes it easier for the programmer to reason about certain classes of problems.

@@yellingintothewind Except for the fact that I am 100% correct. Cry harder. You wrote this wall of bullshit just to say that I am right, but you didn't like what I said.

Triggered by timer or http call, simple to work with, easy to lock down the scaling. Perfect tool for many small bits of work I do.

As a game developer, your programs are doing far more computing than most devs using AWS. They're doing stupid amounts of serialization and network transfer for multi-second HTTP requests, while you're computing physics or game logic on 10s to thousands of objects 30-60 times per second. Or maybe the game engine is, but my point is that your application is actually doing something that's compute intensive, not passing trivial requests with layers of extra shit in-between like most web apps. Learn the networking stack and HTTP and you too can start passing trivial HTTP requests through an excessive number of layers. Or you will see the value in other protocols, like web sockets, and then you can write browser games with multiplayer.

@@david0aloha I mean, potato / potahto. Most of the extra crap those truly massive companies have to deal with is just to help with problem of how big they are. On the other hand those tiny companies that want to pretend they are google could probably learn a thing or two from your comment! As for me - I won't lie. I'm a dogshit programmer. If I need speed then I find clever smoke n mirror tricks to simply hide the fact that I stop doing any work at all. If I can't hide it then I eschew all of the modern amenities of new programming languages just for the sake of cache coherency and avoiding heap allocations in a managed language. If I still need more I reach for the hammers that are my preferred threading and SIMD libraries. Or if I can get away with it, I dump it all on the gpu. Either way I've never solved a problem by actually writing a smarter algorithm. *Every* single algorithm I've ever written in twenty years has always been a for-loop or a nested for-loop.

What syntax code in js can cause a huge tech debt?

And you don't need to hire a full time infra admin... You can work with a company and pay only for managing / deploying the infra... it's litteraly my job, and the company pay far less with paying me deploying baremetal, that paying the same service on aws... With services running far better, with a better control on their data and system... But a lot of company prefer to pay aws, because you know "the cloud is the future", "baremetal is so old school"...

Ah, but if you make a load of bad design decisions in pursuit of "being scalable", then the majority of dev time needs to be spent on infra, which then justifies itself due to the horrendous performance of the system even as a startup with well under 1k users.

@@gto433 The language's performance is the bottleneck, not the syntax.

@@gto433it's not any one particular thing, it's just the general way the GC functions, how easy it is to accidentally make an object long-lived, the general ideology of copying memory as much as possible (I.e people using spread syntax when they could just append to an existing array), and the single threaded nature of node limiting the max concurrent requests too much. Don't get me wrong, it's cool that we can use the same language for front-end and back-end, but most node backend apps could have been written in golang with the same velocity while gaining a bunch of performance for free.

Given that it is event driven how can there be more than one event processed at a time. I believe that you can send a large payload to a lambda to be processed all at once like a kind of batch processing but it's still just the one event

@@brokensythe when you e.g. feed events in from SQS, you can configure the amount of events to be sent together. The only place where you cant do that is through api gateway. for obvious reasons

But that's mostly just running multiple instances of your application, which is a bit different than the application itself running multiple requests.

@@thekwoka4707 depends on how you mean "multiple instances". What I did not mention yet is that Django is now getting decent async support, so there it would handle multiple requests in a single instance I guess. Although it might depends where exactly how you define "instance". But aparr from that ersonally I think I would even consider uwsgi with multithreading enabled to be "multiple requests per instance", at least from a sysadmin perspective.

Yeah the python gripe is old news. It used to be that your only option to utilize you CPU fully was choosing the right size of thread pool for your workload and I/O latency. In comparison, an event loop can automatically make full use of your compute no matter how the workload varies. Comes with some downside. If you're being a "proper engineer" you're forced to write more complex async code and having lots of threads is good insurance against outlier heavy requests blocking your whole server. But nowadays you can use async with FastAPI or if you love Django there's gevent so you'll use some other libs to monkeypatch your I/O and database connection pool and then you can write an async web server in the simple style of a synchronous one. Sounds dodgy, turns out to be trouble free.

Yep, this is the way. Docker / containers also make local dev a lot easier to test/mock

@@WillDelish Easier compared to what though? Because last time I checked, pressing F5 in an IDE wasn't that hard.

@@GackFinderCan you, or one of your upvoters, elaborate? I understood ​​⁠​​⁠@WillDelish point about services running locally in containers makes local testing easier, but I’m not following how “pressing F5” solves the use case he’s referring to.

Lambdalith it’s a thing

@@utubes720 troubleshooting lambdas can be a huge pain if you don’t know if its your code or infra. Some tools like SAM help, but can be slow. Being able to use docker to chain your stuff together & locally test = cool beans, now its only infra problems. Also if you’re wanting to use like rust or latest python etc, lambda might not have a runtime for you, but you can build a custom image and use whatever you want.

JS devs just can't get their heads round the concept of one thread per request and that your whole app runs for every single request. They're used to dealing with multiple events in their code and their code being resident in memory indefinitely, spinning the event queue (like in a webpage). Which is fine, except when you do scale to multiple threads with each thread having multiple events - then you're in for a headache.

Thinking about multiple layers of async (theads AND event loop) seems like it might lead to... productivity loss @@PaulSpades 😂

@@pdougall1 Yeah, so cue the discussions about shared thread memory (with the security concerns) and thread synchronization, both definitely needed now that the long running program is handling a session that might reside on 3 different threads/processors/machines. This never used to be a problem (the server software just passed very basic data structures about the request to all program instances when invoking them). It used to be simple, understandable and effective, CGI was and still is a workhorse.

I believe Ruby MRI still has a GIL though. You'd have to go with JRuby to get around that.

You can't have a discussion about concurrency without someone mentioning Erlang or Elixir - and for good reason, too.

reminds me of how the entirety of Battle Net for the Diablo (can't remember if 1 or 2) was run on a single random PC they had to spare.

Actually it was delivering AAA batteries to my house 3 hours after ordering them.

Yeah and then you've got K8s as an option down the road, once your costs justify an infra team and tooling team, plus there is now a lot of great kubernetes focused tooling available.

Isn't GIL fixed in the latest version?

@@IvanRandomDude What they did in the last version was removing GIL from multiply instances of python inside one process. This is a baby step in this direction. Example when this happened before: Pytroch when you used the fork library under windows effectively both multi process and multi threading were an illusion (and still is because they have to update to the new version yet)

most I/O function reading files, reading network ... is totally done on C land, GIL is released on those, so thats perfeclty multithreaded, so you can def. process multiple requests.

@@jordixboy exactly this. threading can be real if you've got an app that's basically all I/O

@@supergusano2 yep, not to mention that you can build mission critical things easily using the C api where you can release the gil, not that hard..

Laughably small bills with AWS lambda can only come from laughably small active users.

@@Sonsequence : No, it comes from laughably small concurrent active users, which is very true for Enterprise internal applications.

@@vikramkrishnan6414☺️👍

I pickle my pandas with celery!

Even the middle can be cost effective if you plan it out properly. You have to consider the cost of maintaining all this yourself.

so, basically spikey traffic. but I agree with prime in that you have to write your code in such a way that it is easily transferrable to a docker container at least

Oh boy, don't even try to explain to people how CGI works, it might explode their brain.

How do you do SSE (server-sent events) in PHP? Not possible

@@evergreen- You just return data content then two new lines and there's an event sent to client, and you'd need to ob_flush, all encapsulated away, similar to every thing else in http. And streaming the constant response is the same as any other streaming e.g. files. You could even mount your whole app under its framework as a daemon/container listening independently and load balance separately for better performance as you'd need to with most other languages (you could use PHP mostly on its own in other words).

real threads or green threads/asyncio? not the same

@@evergreen- I did write a chat app with SSE in PHP this year, it was a piece of cake. Very easy. Hard to find documentation, though. But you can also use a network socket with php, python or whatever. Socket server libraries have been around for decades.

The latest versions of .NET are cross platform.

Everyone swearing by C# is quite a pain, I must say. Please just give me something like go or ocaml or rust

@@shadamethyst1258 The problems with C# are only that you need to use Visual Studio for the UI creation and that is strongly typed the rest is just bias. I programming currently in C++ and C# is way better: Where I meant were it is used is in interfacing with ABB robots, controls system units but the same time with logistics and such stuff. Actually it good it isn't so hyped. When Java got hyped it got a Jenga Tower of Frameworks on top of each other. JS got React *hust*.

Thats why PHP still 80% of internet , PHP is stateless so you send a request to the server , the response will be a process that will die after finish his job such as HTTP protocol thats why PHP is the secret king 👑 of APIs and SaaS

@@h.s3187I don't believe the process actually dies after the request in PHP-FPM or most PHP servers, but all your variables are garbaged at the end of the request and not shared with whatever's done for the next request. So it's as if the process died but without all the overhead of starting a new process.

any specific references you had in mind? I'm interested in reading about this

In the long run. Not in the beginning

It actually depends what your workload looks like, constant vs bursts, how high is peak vs average. Its not that straightforward.

Serverless is pretty profitable as long as you don't have absurdly high usage, from my experience.

What if your startup fails and you never exceed free tier?

What were you doing in the Lambda's? If they're being an SQS queue then it's pretty trivial. If the Lambda's can't keep up then the queues will just accumulate but you won't lose anything.

i think the good part is that people have different ideas how to approach problems

Great point.

I mean if your business plan is to milk all the money out of their clients..they won't have any clients after a while... Unchecked capitalism will eat itself alive. Companies do not learn...because they aren't people. They are legal contracts to protect the actual individuals from actual liability from their reckless behavior in pursuit of all that glitters and shines

Excalidraw

because the cloud is the future, old vm, or even worse, baremetal, are old school and for loosers... they are cheaper, reliable, but you know, you have to use the "last tech", it's so much better...