6 ms·

Releasing Serverless Framework V.1, and Fundraising

169 points by matlock 10y ago

miguelrochefort 10y ago
This is definitely a step forward for software development. I'm interested to see what people build with it.
- matlock 10y ago
  Thanks Miguel. We're going to release more about our plans for the next steps in the Framework soon. I'm currently writing those and will share with the community in the very near future (CTO of Serverless here)
  - ohstopitu 10y ago
    Hi, I have been using sls since 0.5.6 and I love using it. It's a pleasure to work with, and the community on Gitter is generally eager to help. That said, 1) What's the schedule on the documentation for best practices for SLS in production? 2) What's an example workflow ? (something involving multiple devs, testing, CI etc.) 3) And lastly, What's the timeline on adding support to Google Cloud Functions (in alpha) and Azure Functions?
    - matlock 10y ago
      > 1) What's the schedule on the documentation for best practices for SLS in production? These are the goals for the next releases, giving you better tooling and best practices to go from a few services to many services. >2) What's an example workflow ? (something involving multiple devs, testing, CI etc.) Thats still relatively standard, with good testing, CI, CD , ... but we'll also add more blogposts and docs around that. > And lastly, What's the timeline on adding support to Google Cloud Functions (in alpha) and Azure Functions? Can't give an exact timeline, but we're working with both to be ready once GCF goes into production and working with Azure to get support into Serverless as well. Really also depends on talking to more users to understand how they want to use those providers.
bjacobel 10y ago
Are there other examples of an open-source community project taking on several million dollars in venture capital funding? It seems a bit odd to me. I'm not sure I'm comfortable using a presumably open-source, free (beer and speech) tool knowing that the group behind it will have to find a way to monetize their users in order to justify the investment from VCs at some point down the road. Open-source developers should of course be able to be compensated for their work, and the project has to find a way to sustain itself (I work for a company whose main product is open-source so I know this better than most), but the venture capital model doesn't seem like a good fit with the interests of the community, in my opinion. That said, Serverless is a great tool, and congrats on the 1.0. Thanks to the team for their hard work.
- ac360 10y ago
  Lots. Docker, HashiCorp... It's the go-to-market strategy for lots of products now, especially developer tools.
  - joeblau 10y ago
    Yeah, it seems like the strategy from the VC perspective it to eventually get the team acquihired by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Facebook.
- matlock 10y ago
  Thanks, appreciate the shoutout! There certainly are other open source tools like ansible, Chef, Puppet, Hashicorp, MongoDB (and many more) that have started out as an Open Source project and are still OSS champions. We have many plans for monetisation and are working closely with small to enterprise scale companies on building products and services around the Framework that help you once your infrastructure has reached a large scale. More info to come in the future.
  - bjacobel 10y ago
    To expand on my last point, how are you balancing the needs of an open-source community (steady, stable feature development, good communication/outreach/support, dedication to supporting existing products) with the needs imposed on Serverless by the VC funding model (acquiring new users quickly, launching new products you can monetize, getting hockey stick growth)?
musha68k 10y ago
Great project - best of luck to team Serverless!
dolzenko 10y ago
So it Serverless Framework that seems to be considerably tied to AWS servers. EDIT. Only writing this because its in fact possible to imagine serverLESS framework these days (web workers, p2p etc), but this seems to be just about more volatile servers.
- mxuribe 10y ago
  A small point, but they look to at least consider other non-AWS providers (e.g. Azure) per their note here: https://serverless.com/framework/docs/guide/installing-serverless/#provider-account-setup https://serverless.com/framework/docs/guide/installing-serve...
- dfederschmidt 10y ago
  There are pull-requests open which enable the framework to be used with Azure or IBM BlueMix OpenWhisk
  - cphoover 10y ago
    Hmm if I recall they had logos of azure, ibm whisk, and google cloud fns in their project. Seems those logos have recently been removed. Is this indicative of the future of this project, leaning towards AWS lock-in?
    - matlock 10y ago
      Absolutely not. We definitely want to support all of those providers, but as those integrations aren't in the Framework yet we decided to remove the logos until we actually support them. Not just because users want those, but for us its important to become more provider independent as we don't otherwise have a defensible product. So multi-provider is definitely coming and we're in constant contact with many providers.
- brudgers 10y ago
  'Serverless' as currently jargoned is used to connote that the developer does not have to think about servers (or VM's or containers) directly. The 'serverless' buzzword does not mean that there are not servers somewhere doing useful work.
mxuribe 10y ago
Best of luck!
benrockwood 10y ago
I recently started using APEX. It doesn't rely on CloudFormation and has supports for hacking Golang support. Its worth a look if your getting more serious about Lambda development and interested in other options. http://apex.run/ http://apex.run/
- swordbeta 10y ago
  Does it use API gateway?
- andrewguenther 10y ago
  Why is using CloudFormation a bad thing?
cphoover 10y ago
I really love the new development being done to simplify cloud deployments of stateless horizontally scalable services. Once Serverless supports other λaas offerings I think this will really take off. In addition to the big boys (Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft), I'd love to see some alternative stable open source providers come about. Maybe something built on top of kubernetes or docker swarm.
- matlock 10y ago
  We're actually talking to everyone you mentioned. I'd love to see some "on-premise" Serverless infrastructure as well, the biggest issue with that is still the event system as a Serverless infrastructure really mostly makes sense if you can do things like "when you upload something to this bucket run this function". This is hard to replicate in an on-premise system.
  - alexatkeplar 10y ago
    I don't get what's so difficult to do on-prem. Your target market on-prem all use Kafka as their event bus and either Mesos or Kubernetes as their execution fabric - what's so tricky about fitting into that?
    - matlock 10y ago
      Its not about how tricky the implementation is, but what the value of setting this up is. With Lambda for example you just get this magic that invokes your functions when something happens. You don't have to deal with, manage or think about this at all. And its built into many different parts of the stack from S3 to APIG to Dynamo or SNS. You can of course do something like that yourself in your own infrastructure, but then every piece of software needs to support it somehow, you need to manage that event bus infrastructure and you most likely have to push those events in yourself. And that kind of thing is already there, so the appeal that Serverless event driven systems in the cloud have (because the providers give you all of this out of the box) is much harder to achieve when you have to do that yourself.
southpolesteve 10y ago
Congrats on the raise, but I'll be honest it really rubs me the wrong way that they renamed to "Serverless Framework" from JAWS. They should have picked a different name. The word "Serverless", for better or worse, was what the community settled on. Lot of companies and individuals use it in many different ways and have before this project existed. But they are trying to own it[1]. Not being a good community member IMO. Edit: An example of the kind of thing I am concerned will happen[2]. Use the word "serverless" in a project? Get a take down notice. [1]http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:t7tj9h.5.3 http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:t7t... [2]https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/776142274564616192 https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/776142274564616192
- nanch 10y ago
  Since TESS (Trademark Electronic Search System) requires a session, here is your reference [1] in image format. It's a trademark for SERVERLESS and also SERVERLESS FRAMEWORK both filed on November 25, 2015. https://piqd.com/serverless_tm.png https://piqd.com/serverless_tm.png https://piqd.com/serverless_framework_tm.png https://piqd.com/serverless_framework_tm.png
  - southpolesteve 10y ago
    Thanks!
- ilostmykeys 10y ago
  Asshole Framework.
- dfabulich 10y ago
  I loathe that sort of thing, but in this case I think we lucked out, because "serverless" is a particularly bad name for that style of architecture. Take this as an opportunity to call it "cloud functions" or "functions as a service" or something more accurate/descriptive.
  - tveita 10y ago
rco8786 10y ago
How does this work when a database/persistence layer gets involved? Having a DB connection per function that calls it seems bad.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  My guess is that you'll want something that doesn't have a stateful connection. HTTPS with an authentication header is one possible solution.
- jedberg 10y ago
  This seems to come up every time serverless comes up. There should probably be some better docs around this. It's true each function needs it's own connection, but in reality: 1) The containers actually stick around for a while and get reused so if you write the code correctly it only has to establish the connection once per container invocation 2) Unless you are doing a lot of traffic you'll probably only realistically have a few containers running your functions so it will only be a few connections. 3) If you end up with enough traffic that it actually becomes a problem, it would have been a problem anyway because you'd be running a lot of servers with persistent connections in a more traditional model. In other words, the number of connects and set up and tear down is about the same as in a traditional setup, maybe just a little bit more. Edit: One more thing. Sometimes a counter I hear is "Yeah but every function needs it's own connection". I counter that with the contention that even with a traditional setup, a good abstraction means only one or maybe two functions actually talks to the database -- everyone else should be getting their data from that function. Also if you do it that way that one function can do some smart caching (which survives at least a few minutes with serverless).
  - rco8786 10y ago
    > If you end up with enough traffic that it actually becomes a problem, it would have been a problem anyway because you'd be running a lot of servers with persistent connections in a more traditional model. I think this is the part I disagree with. DB connection pools are much, much smaller than than the total # of functions that touch a database in any reasonably complex application. Yes, scale is always an issue, but it seems to me that in this serverless world where you have 1 connection per function you run into scale issues a lot(order of magnitude?) faster than the "traditional" way. > a good abstraction means only one or maybe two functions actually talks to the database In a serverless world, does this mean you would run a handful of functions with DB connections, and other functions would proxy db requests through them? I can see that working ok I suppose.
michaelmior 10y ago
Does anyone else find the period in "V.1" odd? It seems like it should be V0.1, not V1.0.
syngrog66 10y ago
horrible name
IanCal 10y ago
Good work on the funding. I saw a link on the side to sign up for a beta of the serverless platform, so I did but just keep getting redirected back to the blog post. Is anything supposed to happen?
cyberferret 10y ago
Nice work! I am delving into setting up services on Lambda at the moment, and it can get really fiddly and messy. I like the way server<framework scaffolds projects and makes deployment a one line option. Interested to see where this goes.
elcct 10y ago
I hope something like "AWSless" will follow soon :)

169 points by matlock 10y ago

miguelrochefort 10y ago

This is definitely a step forward for software development. I'm interested to see what people build with it.

matlock 10y ago
Thanks Miguel. We're going to release more about our plans for the next steps in the Framework soon. I'm currently writing those and will share with the community in the very near future (CTO of Serverless here)
- ohstopitu 10y ago
  Hi, I have been using sls since 0.5.6 and I love using it. It's a pleasure to work with, and the community on Gitter is generally eager to help. That said, 1) What's the schedule on the documentation for best practices for SLS in production? 2) What's an example workflow ? (something involving multiple devs, testing, CI etc.) 3) And lastly, What's the timeline on adding support to Google Cloud Functions (in alpha) and Azure Functions?
  - matlock 10y ago
    > 1) What's the schedule on the documentation for best practices for SLS in production? These are the goals for the next releases, giving you better tooling and best practices to go from a few services to many services. >2) What's an example workflow ? (something involving multiple devs, testing, CI etc.) Thats still relatively standard, with good testing, CI, CD , ... but we'll also add more blogposts and docs around that. > And lastly, What's the timeline on adding support to Google Cloud Functions (in alpha) and Azure Functions? Can't give an exact timeline, but we're working with both to be ready once GCF goes into production and working with Azure to get support into Serverless as well. Really also depends on talking to more users to understand how they want to use those providers.

bjacobel 10y ago

Are there other examples of an open-source community project taking on several million dollars in venture capital funding? It seems a bit odd to me. I'm not sure I'm comfortable using a presumably open-source, free (beer and speech) tool knowing that the group behind it will have to find a way to monetize their users in order to justify the investment from VCs at some point down the road. Open-source developers should of course be able to be compensated for their work, and the project has to find a way to sustain itself (I work for a company whose main product is open-source so I know this better than most), but the venture capital model doesn't seem like a good fit with the interests of the community, in my opinion. That said, Serverless is a great tool, and congrats on the 1.0. Thanks to the team for their hard work.

ac360 10y ago
Lots. Docker, HashiCorp... It's the go-to-market strategy for lots of products now, especially developer tools.
- joeblau 10y ago
  Yeah, it seems like the strategy from the VC perspective it to eventually get the team acquihired by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Facebook.
matlock 10y ago
Thanks, appreciate the shoutout! There certainly are other open source tools like ansible, Chef, Puppet, Hashicorp, MongoDB (and many more) that have started out as an Open Source project and are still OSS champions. We have many plans for monetisation and are working closely with small to enterprise scale companies on building products and services around the Framework that help you once your infrastructure has reached a large scale. More info to come in the future.
- bjacobel 10y ago
  To expand on my last point, how are you balancing the needs of an open-source community (steady, stable feature development, good communication/outreach/support, dedication to supporting existing products) with the needs imposed on Serverless by the VC funding model (acquiring new users quickly, launching new products you can monetize, getting hockey stick growth)?

musha68k 10y ago

Great project - best of luck to team Serverless!

dolzenko 10y ago

So it Serverless Framework that seems to be considerably tied to AWS servers. EDIT. Only writing this because its in fact possible to imagine serverLESS framework these days (web workers, p2p etc), but this seems to be just about more volatile servers.

mxuribe 10y ago
A small point, but they look to at least consider other non-AWS providers (e.g. Azure) per their note here: https://serverless.com/framework/docs/guide/installing-serverless/#provider-account-setup https://serverless.com/framework/docs/guide/installing-serve...
dfederschmidt 10y ago
There are pull-requests open which enable the framework to be used with Azure or IBM BlueMix OpenWhisk
- cphoover 10y ago
  Hmm if I recall they had logos of azure, ibm whisk, and google cloud fns in their project. Seems those logos have recently been removed. Is this indicative of the future of this project, leaning towards AWS lock-in?
  - matlock 10y ago
    Absolutely not. We definitely want to support all of those providers, but as those integrations aren't in the Framework yet we decided to remove the logos until we actually support them. Not just because users want those, but for us its important to become more provider independent as we don't otherwise have a defensible product. So multi-provider is definitely coming and we're in constant contact with many providers.
brudgers 10y ago
'Serverless' as currently jargoned is used to connote that the developer does not have to think about servers (or VM's or containers) directly. The 'serverless' buzzword does not mean that there are not servers somewhere doing useful work.

mxuribe 10y ago

Best of luck!

benrockwood 10y ago

I recently started using APEX. It doesn't rely on CloudFormation and has supports for hacking Golang support. Its worth a look if your getting more serious about Lambda development and interested in other options. http://apex.run/ http://apex.run/

swordbeta 10y ago
Does it use API gateway?
andrewguenther 10y ago
Why is using CloudFormation a bad thing?

cphoover 10y ago

I really love the new development being done to simplify cloud deployments of stateless horizontally scalable services. Once Serverless supports other λaas offerings I think this will really take off. In addition to the big boys (Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft), I'd love to see some alternative stable open source providers come about. Maybe something built on top of kubernetes or docker swarm.

matlock 10y ago
We're actually talking to everyone you mentioned. I'd love to see some "on-premise" Serverless infrastructure as well, the biggest issue with that is still the event system as a Serverless infrastructure really mostly makes sense if you can do things like "when you upload something to this bucket run this function". This is hard to replicate in an on-premise system.
- alexatkeplar 10y ago
  I don't get what's so difficult to do on-prem. Your target market on-prem all use Kafka as their event bus and either Mesos or Kubernetes as their execution fabric - what's so tricky about fitting into that?
  - matlock 10y ago
    Its not about how tricky the implementation is, but what the value of setting this up is. With Lambda for example you just get this magic that invokes your functions when something happens. You don't have to deal with, manage or think about this at all. And its built into many different parts of the stack from S3 to APIG to Dynamo or SNS. You can of course do something like that yourself in your own infrastructure, but then every piece of software needs to support it somehow, you need to manage that event bus infrastructure and you most likely have to push those events in yourself. And that kind of thing is already there, so the appeal that Serverless event driven systems in the cloud have (because the providers give you all of this out of the box) is much harder to achieve when you have to do that yourself.

southpolesteve 10y ago

Congrats on the raise, but I'll be honest it really rubs me the wrong way that they renamed to "Serverless Framework" from JAWS. They should have picked a different name. The word "Serverless", for better or worse, was what the community settled on. Lot of companies and individuals use it in many different ways and have before this project existed. But they are trying to own it[1]. Not being a good community member IMO. Edit: An example of the kind of thing I am concerned will happen[2]. Use the word "serverless" in a project? Get a take down notice. [1]http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:t7tj9h.5.3 http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:t7t... [2]https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/776142274564616192 https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/776142274564616192

nanch 10y ago
Since TESS (Trademark Electronic Search System) requires a session, here is your reference [1] in image format. It's a trademark for SERVERLESS and also SERVERLESS FRAMEWORK both filed on November 25, 2015. https://piqd.com/serverless_tm.png https://piqd.com/serverless_tm.png https://piqd.com/serverless_framework_tm.png https://piqd.com/serverless_framework_tm.png
- southpolesteve 10y ago
  Thanks!
ilostmykeys 10y ago
Asshole Framework.
dfabulich 10y ago
I loathe that sort of thing, but in this case I think we lucked out, because "serverless" is a particularly bad name for that style of architecture. Take this as an opportunity to call it "cloud functions" or "functions as a service" or something more accurate/descriptive.
- tveita 10y ago

rco8786 10y ago

How does this work when a database/persistence layer gets involved? Having a DB connection per function that calls it seems bad.

rbanffy 10y ago
My guess is that you'll want something that doesn't have a stateful connection. HTTPS with an authentication header is one possible solution.
jedberg 10y ago
This seems to come up every time serverless comes up. There should probably be some better docs around this. It's true each function needs it's own connection, but in reality: 1) The containers actually stick around for a while and get reused so if you write the code correctly it only has to establish the connection once per container invocation 2) Unless you are doing a lot of traffic you'll probably only realistically have a few containers running your functions so it will only be a few connections. 3) If you end up with enough traffic that it actually becomes a problem, it would have been a problem anyway because you'd be running a lot of servers with persistent connections in a more traditional model. In other words, the number of connects and set up and tear down is about the same as in a traditional setup, maybe just a little bit more. Edit: One more thing. Sometimes a counter I hear is "Yeah but every function needs it's own connection". I counter that with the contention that even with a traditional setup, a good abstraction means only one or maybe two functions actually talks to the database -- everyone else should be getting their data from that function. Also if you do it that way that one function can do some smart caching (which survives at least a few minutes with serverless).
- rco8786 10y ago
  > If you end up with enough traffic that it actually becomes a problem, it would have been a problem anyway because you'd be running a lot of servers with persistent connections in a more traditional model. I think this is the part I disagree with. DB connection pools are much, much smaller than than the total # of functions that touch a database in any reasonably complex application. Yes, scale is always an issue, but it seems to me that in this serverless world where you have 1 connection per function you run into scale issues a lot(order of magnitude?) faster than the "traditional" way. > a good abstraction means only one or maybe two functions actually talks to the database In a serverless world, does this mean you would run a handful of functions with DB connections, and other functions would proxy db requests through them? I can see that working ok I suppose.

michaelmior 10y ago

Does anyone else find the period in "V.1" odd? It seems like it should be V0.1, not V1.0.

syngrog66 10y ago

horrible name

IanCal 10y ago

Good work on the funding. I saw a link on the side to sign up for a beta of the serverless platform, so I did but just keep getting redirected back to the blog post. Is anything supposed to happen?

cyberferret 10y ago

Nice work! I am delving into setting up services on Lambda at the moment, and it can get really fiddly and messy. I like the way server<framework scaffolds projects and makes deployment a one line option. Interested to see where this goes.

elcct 10y ago

I hope something like "AWSless" will follow soon :)