6 ms·

AWS Lambda

526 points by cpenner461 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jedberg 12y ago
I’ve had a chance to use the service for a couple of weeks. My quick summary review is that it’s a little tricky setting up the IAM roles and security groups, but once you have that going, it works great! I see a ton of potential here in transforming the way people use AWS. I also put together the Netflix use cases in the keynote so if you have any questions I’ll try to answer them!
- turingbook 12y ago
  What does this mean to application development? Is it something revolutionay?
  - jedberg 12y ago
    Interesting question. I think some advanced apps already use these techniques. For example we already do event driven things at Netflix. What this does it make it a lot easier for smaller companies to do it without having to invest in all the infrastructure. So I think yes, it will be revolutionary in the sense that it will get a lot more people using what I think is the future direction of compute and application building.
  - willyg302 12y ago
    Not exactly revolutionary per se, it's an idea that's been around at least as long as shells, and as mentioned in the keynote it's a natural level of abstraction above AWS APIs. The neat part is how this simple idea has been translated to applications at scale. IMO what's really going to be revolutionary is what we end up doing with it, but we're going to have to wait a bit to find that out :)
  - atmosx 12y ago
    No idea, for the time being the only supported language is JS. I'm trying to understand if I can run ruby applications by glancing here and there... Didn't had the time to look into it yet, but everyone seems very excited about it.
    - disbelief 12y ago
      You can't, yet. They have plans to add "other languages" on their roadmap.
- joshuahutt 12y ago
  One thing I am struggling to understand is how much of my applications can be replaced with Lambda. I think it would be really awesome to make applications that do not have any dedicated instances associated with them, but are entirely based on the various AWS platforms. For some things, it seems like Lambda could be a drop-in replacement, whereas others, it would not quite fit the bill. Do you think it will be possible to build a viable a "server-free" application with Lambda and the other services (S3, DynamoDB)? Or is it probably going to be limited to the types of use cases listed on the landing page[1]? [1] http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/
  - willyg302 12y ago
    It is completely possible. Consider that the major uses for a server are interacting with clients, storing data (backend database) and manipulating that data. Here the clients can interact directly with S3/Dynamo, this in turn will trigger Lambda functions to manipulate data, and the round trip can be accomplished via SNS. Of course, it would be much more viable to have some sort of server running (for example I doubt Netflix has replaced their entire backend with Lambda functions), but a great majority of workflows dealing with stateless data manipulation and events can now be streamlined and even replaced.
  - jedberg 12y ago
    I think it's completely possible. Amazon has all the pieces you need (compute and storage). That being said, you may need to wait for ec2 events to do some really complicated stuff.
  - krallin 12y ago
    It seems like you're limited to 25 concurrent lambda functions executing (at least at this time). This looks like it's more geared towards enabling you to automate / orchestrate your AWS resources, that run customer-facing code.
    - jedberg 12y ago
      The 25 function limit is probably one of those small defaults that's easy to change, like the 20 instance limit.
- jvandyke 12y ago
  Do you know if you can respond to events from SWS or SQS?
  - jedberg 12y ago
    As of today, no. Probably coming in the future though. I got the impression that eventually all Aws services will emit events.
    - mring33621 12y ago
      After reading the description of AWS Lambda, I expected SQS to be first in the list of event sources. Huh.
      - sk5t 12y ago
        Wouldn't that be kind of unnecessary, when it's not too tough to write an SQS-reactive client? Starting with S3 fills a gap as there is AFAIK otherwise no way to start processing based on changes to S3, without writing a rather wasteful program to list the resources, maintain state, and hunt for differences.
        amalag 12y ago
        But if you have an SQS reactive client it would sit in EC2. With a service like Lambda, they are promising millisecond based pricing. A very ambitious project by them.
  - scott_w 12y ago
    Not directly, no. However, the documentation states that you can use CloudTrail to log the requests from SQS to S3, then have changes to S3 trigger the events that can get your Lambda function to respond. It's a little convoluted, but that seems to be the way they're going for now.
  - disbelief 12y ago
    Currently the only services supported are S3, DynamoDB, and Kinesis. Seems like a no-brainer that they'll be adding other services though.
- namuol 12y ago
  Has the keynote been made public anywhere yet?
  - nivertech 12y ago
    AWS re:Invent 2014 | Day 2 Keynote with Werner Vogels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ere8VTJDqao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ere8VTJDqao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1MrZkGFpuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1MrZkGFpuE TL;DR version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hqwk7Ey5u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hqwk7Ey5u0
- epowell101 12y ago
  Could you use it more generically, meaning not "just" within an app but also as part of an overall control plane, sending commands to other APIs like a notification system?
MBlume 12y ago
Right now the only language/runtime supported is js/node, but they intend to include others. (figured people would want to know this, and you have to scroll a ways to find out, so)
- netcraft 12y ago
  that was my first question. What page did you see that on? Edit: found it here: http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/ http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/
  - MBlume 12y ago
    > At launch, AWS Lambda will support Node.js code, with support for other languages coming in the future. http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/details/ http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/details/
  - sync 12y ago
    The blog also goes into much more detail regarding node integration: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/run-code-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/run-code-cloud/
- jakozaur 12y ago
  Since Intel already ships CPU for them, maybe they should ask for an CPU with asm.js as their assembly language :-P. The jokes ppl make are starting to get a bit more real: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- pkpp1233 12y ago
  This reminds me of Blockspring except they do a bunch of languages.
- notastartup 12y ago
  I saw it and was shocked that Python is not yet supported.
tomcart 12y ago
Seems like a much more interesting announcement than the container service. Can see the architectures of dozens of our systms collapsing down with this.
- derefr 12y ago
  At a guess, Container Service was built in order to build this. I.e. Lambda is probably an ECS cluster creating and running Node.js-based Docker containers. (A bit like Heroku's original Ruby stack, actually.) It's a bit amusing to note that they could have built Lambda on top of their own previous Elastic Beanstalk Docker offering instead, but chose to build ECS presumably for cost reasons (which everyone who has evaluated Elastic Beanstalk's Docker support will understand.)
dkarapetyan 12y ago
All these announcement are making me feel sorry for all the other players in the cloud game. The other guys don't even come close.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Agreed. However, Amazon's pricing and rather complicated infrastructure means that there will always be a market for people like the DigitalOcean's of the world (I just want a cheap VM, now).
- rodgerd 12y ago
  I feel sorry for all the people in 5 - 10 years who discover Amazonis now in a position to charge monopoly rents.
  - Apoplectic 12y ago
    And yet, they don't. Compare that to Oracle. Plus, when Amazon makes a new cloud architecture that gets popular, others copy it. OpenStack will have this if need be in a year or two and then you can port to OS in 5 years when the rent goes up. Oh, and FWIW, when has AWS raised a price? My servers have gotten cheaper every year I've had them with AWS (3).
    - epowell101 12y ago
      Regarding OpenStack and something similar, there is the underlying workflow service (not quite the same I know) called Mistral. A project called StackStorm that is related but adds event handling and a rule engine launched a couple weeks ago.
- tekacs 12y ago
  Though several of them run architectures on open technologies, which places them in a different situation entirely.
hackerews 12y ago
You can rip out quite a bit of logic into separate services with this. Will definitely be interesting to see how Lambda actually works. Try out Blockspring, you can play around with your usecase now (and no vendor lock-in).
cperciva 12y ago
Something I want: AWS Lambda code which responds to S3 PUTs by issuing Cloudfront invalidations. Anyone want to write this?
- ncallaway 12y ago
  I imagine it would be very with the S3 Event Notification stuff they also released today: http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/s3-event-notification/ http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/s3-event-notification/
  - cperciva 12y ago
    Yes, exactly. Someone needs to write the code, that's all; I'll do it myself if necessary, but if someone else gets there first all the better.
    - donavanm 12y ago
      Watch out for the limit on the number of concurrent invalidation batches. Youll probably want to scan for "pending" PUT objects and try aggregate them in to an invalidation batch.
      - cperciva 12y ago
        Good point. I guess this would need to be "S3 PUT event triggers code which adds object name to a list and starts a timer"; "timer expiry triggers code which issues a batch invalidate for the list (and empties the list)". I wonder if there's any good way to generate that timer expiry event...
        donavanm 12y ago
        Hrm, I havent gone through the docs completely but object lifcycle managment on the sentinel/list object?
mathgladiator 12y ago
This is way cool especially considering S3's event notification will enable a ton of interesting workflows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602955
dominotw 12y ago
Would this be useful for build services like setting up a jenkins instance using lambda compute resources as slaves?
- saynay 12y ago
  It looks like Lambda functions are limited in complexity and runtime duration. The way I see it is pairing it with the container service (ECS) and spawning containers in response to events, possibly spawning EC2 instances if you need more computer. It looks like Lambdas can also be set to execute at a scheduled time, so you could make a delayed Lambda that would shut down any EC2 instances you spawned as well.
- willyg302 12y ago
  Using Lambda for the slaves is probably not the best idea because, as @saynay mentioned, you couldn't run builds any longer than a few minutes. You could "wrap" a Jenkins fleet running on EC2 with Lambda functions to set up on a build request event and tear down on a build finish event, and theoretically this would reduce the amount of resources you consume if your builds are few and far between. Think of GitHub webhooks triggering Travis CI as an analogy. Whether or not that would actually be useful is debatable.
jlrubin 12y ago
How is this different from CGI?
davidw 12y ago
From a casual glance: it's kind of like Heroku but with Node.js, and it scales automatically?
Zaheer 12y ago
This reminds me of http://www.Webscript.io http://www.Webscript.io Similar single event -> function service
jameshart 12y ago
Claiming that your code is a 'lambda function' makes it sound sexy, but.. isn't it really just a procedure? Unless I'm missing something and there is some higher-ordered capability for composing AWS lambda functions together in a way that permits the platform to perform lambda reductions or optimize resource allocation...
- willyg302 12y ago
  Lambda function, not lambda function. Capitalization is key (the former is just a brand name). Having reductions and composition would be really cool, but from what I could glean from the demos each function is containerized. Stateless and idempotent like lambda functions, but right now chaining more than one together requires an intermediary event.
- gbrits 12y ago
  I guess the term 'Lambda' here is taken to mean 'a function without side effects'. So no higher-order chainability, etc. afaik.
  - jameshart 12y ago
    Except that it can have side effects, can't it - it can trigger services, cause stuff to be changed in a datastore. It doesn't have any local stateful storage, but it can make use of remote state. In that respect, how is it different from basically any web request processor?
- nightpool 12y ago
  Lambda is just the brand name.
salimmadjd 12y ago
Amazon Echo (voice interface of IoT) + Amazon Lambda (the cloud services of (IoT) = Amazon disrupting home appliance IoT products.
spitfire 12y ago
I wish they hadn't named the units of computation "Lambda functions". Cause, you know there's already something known as a "Lambda function" in computer science. But kudos for Amazon for furthering the datacenter-is-the-computer approach. It is simply the right thing to do.
- erichmond 12y ago
  I'm guessing they borrowed it from this : http://lambda-architecture.net/ http://lambda-architecture.net/
  - apetresc 12y ago
    I'm not sure what Nathan Marz's "Lambda Architecture" has anything to do with AWS Lambda, though
  - turingbook 12y ago
    The Forbes article said it is named after Star Wars space craft: http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/11/13/more-amazonian-announcements-aws-anoints-docker-and-makes-a-nod-towards-star-wars/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/11/13/more-amazoni... But I think it is simply named after the functional language feature. The core concept of this service is function.
  - bruceboughton 12y ago
    I don't think so. That is another naming abomination.
- mehh 12y ago
  Really douche to use a computer science term as your product name, are they going to trade mark that or are the just happy with the confusion it will cause.
  - codezero 12y ago
    I have a hard time believing there is cause for confusion here, have Physicists been stumped by Amazon Redshift? I'm not being facetious, I just don't see how a product name that is niche to people using Amazon services is likely to confuse people. Also, CS hardly owns the greek letter lambda, it like many greek letters has been used for many products and features over the years. Delta is an airline, but they're doing OK, among others. I am just curious what your issue with this is, and if you can come up with some concrete scenarios where this could really confuse people.
cschmidt 12y ago
> You can use any third party library, even native ones. [1] I realize they are starting with node.js, but I wonder how this will work? It sounds like they plan to support arbitrary dependencies. Will you upload a Docker container with your necessary dependencies? They talk about milliseconds until your code is running, and containers may be (?) slower than that. Or am I hoping for too much. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/details/ http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/details/
- tekacs 12y ago
  It's definitely possible to do this if you're not set on containers. We do it at http://wym.io/ http://wym.io/ by putting our runtime library in the environment that the code runs in and keeping the runtimes around, keeping the environment clean along the way. We're working towards doing all that (and more than) Lambda does in a deploy-your-own fashion...
adelevie 12y ago
Is this comparable to IronWorker?
- sync 12y ago
  Yes, seems like a direct competitor to IronWorker to me. IronWorker has a few benefits such as being able to run any docker container and react to a HTTP Post (webhook) directly, but overall very similar to Lambda.
- impostervt 12y ago
  You can also configure your IronWorker more so than you can a lambda. For instance, I have an IronWorker that requires a library not installed by default, so I use the "deb" command to install it during the build process. And of course, it supports more than just Node.js.
- carimura 12y ago
  [I'm with Iron.io] Similar, yes. We're excited that developers are seeing the power of the task/worker/lambda being the scalable unit of work rather than server or VM or even container. Haven't used Lambda much yet but off hand we see many IronWorker advantages: - Supports all languages - Easily scale to thousands of parallel workers - Integrated logging, error reporting, alerts, auto-retries on failure - Integration with IronMQ our queue service to achieve stream processing and pipelining - A great dashboard to manage your workers/tasks And many innovations/announcements coming soon that'll make using IronWorker a great choice for developers both on AWS and inside the enterprise firewall.
  - jakemcgraw 12y ago
    I recently used iron.io to process around 750K images (generating pHashes for duplicate detection). The service is fantastic.
makmanalp 12y ago
I'm so torn - on one side this is a very neat thing that'll save a lot of boilerplate, and on the other it screams of vendor lock-in.
- orange_sharpie 12y ago
  that's a REALLY good point! this feature seems really solid, but they seem to be putting a sort-of "golden handcuff" on you. If you have a distributed system on AWS which implements "lambda functions," you can forget about switching to Azure, or your own bare metal servers without having to go through some pain. "vendor lock-in" definitely seems to have been their motto here, very clever & great observation!
- vmarsy 12y ago
  as MBlume mentionned[1], they seem to support NodeJS. From the FAQ : "At launch AWS Lambda supports code written in Node.js (JavaScript). Your code can include existing Node.js libraries, even native ones." so it seems that you can avoid lock-in if most of your javascript code is not too coupled to Amazon's API And they claim on the detail page: "With AWS Lambda, there are no new languages, tools, or frameworks to learn. You can use any third party library, even native ones. At launch, AWS Lambda will support Node.js code, with support for other languages coming in the future." [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603059
  - mooreds 12y ago
    Err, I think the parent's point wasn't lockin in terms of the code you write, but in terms of your architecture. Setting up your own system driven off of s3 or dynamodb events (if you wanted to move the functions onto your own bare metal) would be a pretty big project.
    - justincormack 12y ago
      ZeroVM lets you run code on Swift, Openstack's S3 clone. Although it is not evented, and they mainly support Python, so it is a way off at present.
marknadal 12y ago
Holy mind blowing awesomeness, this changes everything, yet I feel like this was such an obvious thing to do. So obvious that I can't believe it is real. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why AWS defines the cloud, they are so far beyond everyone else and still innovating, even and the most basic level.
- erichmond 12y ago
  This idea has existed for years (see storm, samza), but it's great AWS is wrapping the infrastructure piece for those who can't roll their own!
luminati 12y ago
Haven't had much time to read the docs. Sorry if it's already evident, but does it allow for running Lambda code on cron as opposed to listening to some event?
- numlocked 12y ago
  Yes. From the bottom of TFA: Scheduled Tasks AWS Lambda functions can be triggered by external event timers, so functions can be run during regularly scheduled maintenance times or non-peak hours. For example, you can trigger an AWS Lambda function to perform nightly archive cleanups during non-busy hours.
  - luminati 12y ago
    That's great news. Thanks mate.
    - Rapzid 12y ago
      Reliability is my real question around not only this, but lambda as a whole. I'll need to dig into the docs on that.
impostervt 12y ago
I love that it uses Node.js to start, but does it support NPM?
- impostervt 12y ago
  Looks like yes: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/walkthrough-s3-events-adminuser-create-test-function-create-function.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/walkthrough-s3-e... Now, how to deal with node packages that require libraries not on the default amazon linux ami?
  - bradyd 12y ago
    From that example it looks like it doesn't support NPM directly, instead you download the dependencies locally and include the node_modules directory in the zip file you upload. Interestingly the example makes use of ImageMagick, which I don't believe is in the default AMI.
ColinCera 12y ago
I'd pretty much given up on AWS for compute and moved most everything to Linode and some bare metal servers, but this service looks very compelling for discrete compute tasks. The ability to pay only for the fractions of seconds actually used, and the ability to scale quickly without provisioning (or over-provisioning) EC2 instances, is awfully attractive. Plus, Amazon has priced this pretty aggressively — i.e., it looks shockingly cheap.
numlocked 12y ago
Should I think of this essentially as an abstraction that can replace my asynchronous task queue + workers (e.g. RabbitMQ + Celery workers, obviously assuming you aren't using MQ for additional messaging)? I hate managing those pieces and would be happy to hand that infrastructure to Lambda, but are there additional benefits or use cases that are opened up? I guess I would have expected others to describe this the same way ("replaces your distributed task queue"), but since I'm not seeing that description I wonder if I've misunderstood.
- crucialfelix 12y ago
  Rabbit and celery is the backend system I have now. I was doing a lot of things on demand, event driven, but this resulted in overloading the database ( currently my system constraint ) or in elongating the queue too much. Some event would flood the queue with thousands of tasks. Now I have a periodic task that on each iteration chooses the most pressing task. And the system is stable but I have a bad backlog. So I'd love to have a reactive task system where I didn't have to worry about the resource usage. Think how much precious developer time I've wasted just managing resource expenditures. Much of my coding this week has been just trying to optimize for this stupid constraint. How many processors do I have, how much disk io, is the memory getting close to swapping ? I for one welcome our new cloud overlords.
- jberryman 12y ago
  I guess maybe part of what you might be missing is that these "Lambda functions" can (will be able to?) be kicked off by all sorts of different AWS events, so it can replace queue + workers where you're generating tasks from your own code, but it might also be able to replace the code that generates those tasks too.
  - numlocked 12y ago
    Now that you say it, I'm sure we'll see wrappers to support this type of thing. For instance, I could imagine a django library that provides a declarative way to wire Django signals to AWS Lambda functions. lambda_signal(Model, signal_name, lambda_fn_name) When that signal fired on the model, the model would get serialized to JSON and sent to the lambda function. It'd be fun to whip this up if no one beats me to the punch. lambda_signal(User, 'post_save', 'sync_to_mailchimp')
dk8996 12y ago
Is it me or AWS is releasing too many services... there is a service for everything. I wounder if they are just throwing stuff out there see what sticks... kinda like landing pages.
- poxrud 12y ago
  To be fair, unlike google they are not cancelling any services. I think Amazon first builds these services for internal use, and then releases them to the public.
  - dk8996 12y ago
    We will see. I hope I am wrong but how many of these are production ready? It seems to be that most of them are in preview/beta.
  - rifung 12y ago
    As far as I know this isn't the case (used to work across from them)
  - Apoplectic 12y ago
    To be fair, you have to pay per unit for these services, so as long as people are using them, Amazon is making money. Putting a service out to pasture in maintenance mode probably wouldn't cost that much.
    - mentat 12y ago
      Maintenance on all of their services is non-trivial in terms of people at least. However if they are used internally, directly or indirectly then they're already paying for it.
- jrmcauliffe 12y ago
  If you listen to Amazon at their shin-digs, they tell it like all of these new services and features are in response to requests from existing customers.
jbaudanza 12y ago
It would be nice if a lambda could respond to web requests. Maybe an Elastic Loud Balancer could be an "event-source".
- tekacs 12y ago
  We support exactly this[1]. http://wym.io/ http://wym.io/ Incidentally I almost had a heart attack when I saw the Lambda announcement. :P [1]: We also provide the ability to respond to other kinds of events as does Lambda.
- saranagati 12y ago
  havent looked too much into it but I dont see why it couldnt. use s3 website, event notification to notify a user accessed a file (web page) and generates a new custom file in your bucket. generated file has some sort of preshared known info between the two in the file name (eg client ip address or cookie). accessed web page either sends back a page reload to the new generated page or just an async page that will render the custom content. edit: oh also delete the generated file once accessed using lambda by either delete on get notification or just a lambda scheduled event.
notastartup 12y ago
What about dependencies. What if you need a specific environment setup first in order to process. Would you end up paying 1 minute for each request just so that it can start installing bunch of stuff? Is it possible to just setup a VM of some sort and use that environment each time? If thats possible Lambda would be like PiCloud but without Python, and will stick around (hopefully).
- deleted 12y ago
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debaserab2 12y ago
I'm excited for this. This replaces what I wanted to use SQS for. SQS always felt like too much vendor lock-in to me to justify not using something like RabbitMQ or Beanstalkd. With Lambda, the resource consuming the queue is managed for me - that is huge. Also, the pay by time model is perfect for this - instead of managing when to stop/start resource intensive instances, I don't even have to think about the problem. I only get charged what I used, which can be crucial during growth stages of a business or prototype. The big penalty is the vendor lock-in, but this tips the scales for me for certain things.
- crescentfresh 12y ago
  > *the resource consuming the queue Are you referring to kinesis as the queue here? Sqs/sns are not (yet?) supported as event generators for lambda.
hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
Full-circle back to mainframe era.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
turingbook 12y ago
Werner Vogels's blog about Lambda: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/aws-lambda.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/aws-lambda.html
GIFtheory 12y ago
Sounds a bit like Mirage OS to me (http://www.openmirage.org http://www.openmirage.org).
- yohanatan 12y ago
  Nope, nothing at all like that.
nivertech 12y ago
Does AWS Lambda supports cron-like periodic triggers?
- epowell101 12y ago
  Yes.
james33 12y ago
It sounds like this is essentially what Joyent's Manta is, which we've been using in production for the last year and have found to be absolutely fantastic. Are there differences that I'm not seeing?
- nivertech 12y ago
  It's not. The name is confusing. Especially when you hear AWS Lambda and DynamoDB/S3 in the same sentence.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
This looks quite interesting, and a lot more fun to work with than maintaining a pool of servers ready to handle events and spinning up new ones based on capacity. Anyone know of any similar mechanisms for the OpenStack world, or more generally for any cloud infrastructure other than AWS?
motoboi 12y ago
AWS Lambda announcement video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eHoyUVo-yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eHoyUVo-yg
Apoplectic 12y ago
Huh? Shared server infrastructure? That's really what this sounds like. Welcome to web hosting in 1999 guys. Most of the point of AWS was that you have your own dedicated resources. Sure, this is a scaling solution, but revolutionary?
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > Welcome to web hosting in 1999 guys. Sorry, where were you getting servers in 1999 that existed for fractions of a second?
  - Apoplectic 12y ago
    Ain't a 'server' boss. They're running a segment of code. When someone hits your PHP page on an oversubscribed DreamHost box with 4000 other sites contending for resources, it's pretty much the same thing. Here we're getting some dedicated CPU/Mem, but it ain't a 'server.' Where's the dedicated disk and ability to install/run whatever I want? Nope, just a lil segment of JS running on a shared resource and billed in 100ms increments.
hendry 12y ago
I tweeted that it's a PITA to transcoded uploaded media yesterday and today AWS solve the problem! I HAVE THE POWER https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/532783437225025537 https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/532783437225025537
sly010 12y ago
IaaS -> PaaS slowly but surely
riobard 12y ago
How is it different from Google App Engine? Conceptually the two seem very similar to me, that is, developers do not have to worry about the underling infrastructure at all---just write code and deploy.
- willyg302 12y ago
  As a tldr, not-quite-right distinction, GAE is more of a platform whereas Lambda is more of a service. I feel that GAE is a much more generalized solution for building/deploying applications, e.g. it's very integrated with BigTable and has caching/cron/queuing support. To a point you do not have to worry about the infrastructure, but write any GAE app at scale and soon you'll run into questions of caching some content and optimizing DB writes. Whereas Lambda, at least right now, is a more specific use case: respond to an event by running some code. It's too early to tell whether managing Lambda functions will require fine-tuning the "advanced settings" (in all honesty it probably will) but it seems like it's much simpler.
waitingkuo 12y ago
How can it compare to zappier?
- epowell101 12y ago
  Or StackStorm? Or https://factor.io/ https://factor.io/ I think much much more intra application wiring as opposed to inter app / tool chain wiring. Or?
hyperliner 12y ago
I finally have stored procedures and triggers for my DynamoDB database!
amelius 12y ago
One difficult part of doing event triggered processing is in the progress reporting and keeping the code related to it simple. I wonder how they deal with that.
squidcactus28 12y ago
How to get this on private cloud?
rajatchopra 12y ago
Good stuff. Basically it seems to do the bind+listen for you if you are the trigger subscriber. If you are the trigger generator, then it does socket.write for you. But the big deal is that you dont pay for 'listen', just pay for the function execution. The one thing that will surely happen with this is that the code written will be 'locked in' to run only on aws territory.

526 points by cpenner461 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

I’ve had a chance to use the service for a couple of weeks. My quick summary review is that it’s a little tricky setting up the IAM roles and security groups, but once you have that going, it works great! I see a ton of potential here in transforming the way people use AWS. I also put together the Netflix use cases in the keynote so if you have any questions I’ll try to answer them!

turingbook 12y ago
What does this mean to application development? Is it something revolutionay?
- jedberg 12y ago
  Interesting question. I think some advanced apps already use these techniques. For example we already do event driven things at Netflix. What this does it make it a lot easier for smaller companies to do it without having to invest in all the infrastructure. So I think yes, it will be revolutionary in the sense that it will get a lot more people using what I think is the future direction of compute and application building.
- willyg302 12y ago
  Not exactly revolutionary per se, it's an idea that's been around at least as long as shells, and as mentioned in the keynote it's a natural level of abstraction above AWS APIs. The neat part is how this simple idea has been translated to applications at scale. IMO what's really going to be revolutionary is what we end up doing with it, but we're going to have to wait a bit to find that out :)
- atmosx 12y ago
  No idea, for the time being the only supported language is JS. I'm trying to understand if I can run ruby applications by glancing here and there... Didn't had the time to look into it yet, but everyone seems very excited about it.
  - disbelief 12y ago
    You can't, yet. They have plans to add "other languages" on their roadmap.
joshuahutt 12y ago
One thing I am struggling to understand is how much of my applications can be replaced with Lambda. I think it would be really awesome to make applications that do not have any dedicated instances associated with them, but are entirely based on the various AWS platforms. For some things, it seems like Lambda could be a drop-in replacement, whereas others, it would not quite fit the bill. Do you think it will be possible to build a viable a "server-free" application with Lambda and the other services (S3, DynamoDB)? Or is it probably going to be limited to the types of use cases listed on the landing page[1]? [1] http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/
- willyg302 12y ago
  It is completely possible. Consider that the major uses for a server are interacting with clients, storing data (backend database) and manipulating that data. Here the clients can interact directly with S3/Dynamo, this in turn will trigger Lambda functions to manipulate data, and the round trip can be accomplished via SNS. Of course, it would be much more viable to have some sort of server running (for example I doubt Netflix has replaced their entire backend with Lambda functions), but a great majority of workflows dealing with stateless data manipulation and events can now be streamlined and even replaced.
- jedberg 12y ago
  I think it's completely possible. Amazon has all the pieces you need (compute and storage). That being said, you may need to wait for ec2 events to do some really complicated stuff.
- krallin 12y ago
  It seems like you're limited to 25 concurrent lambda functions executing (at least at this time). This looks like it's more geared towards enabling you to automate / orchestrate your AWS resources, that run customer-facing code.
  - jedberg 12y ago
    The 25 function limit is probably one of those small defaults that's easy to change, like the 20 instance limit.
jvandyke 12y ago
Do you know if you can respond to events from SWS or SQS?
- jedberg 12y ago
  As of today, no. Probably coming in the future though. I got the impression that eventually all Aws services will emit events.
  - mring33621 12y ago
    After reading the description of AWS Lambda, I expected SQS to be first in the list of event sources. Huh.
    - sk5t 12y ago
      Wouldn't that be kind of unnecessary, when it's not too tough to write an SQS-reactive client? Starting with S3 fills a gap as there is AFAIK otherwise no way to start processing based on changes to S3, without writing a rather wasteful program to list the resources, maintain state, and hunt for differences.
      - amalag 12y ago
        But if you have an SQS reactive client it would sit in EC2. With a service like Lambda, they are promising millisecond based pricing. A very ambitious project by them.
- scott_w 12y ago
  Not directly, no. However, the documentation states that you can use CloudTrail to log the requests from SQS to S3, then have changes to S3 trigger the events that can get your Lambda function to respond. It's a little convoluted, but that seems to be the way they're going for now.
- disbelief 12y ago
  Currently the only services supported are S3, DynamoDB, and Kinesis. Seems like a no-brainer that they'll be adding other services though.
namuol 12y ago
Has the keynote been made public anywhere yet?
- nivertech 12y ago
  AWS re:Invent 2014 | Day 2 Keynote with Werner Vogels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ere8VTJDqao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ere8VTJDqao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1MrZkGFpuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1MrZkGFpuE TL;DR version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hqwk7Ey5u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hqwk7Ey5u0
epowell101 12y ago
Could you use it more generically, meaning not "just" within an app but also as part of an overall control plane, sending commands to other APIs like a notification system?

MBlume 12y ago

Right now the only language/runtime supported is js/node, but they intend to include others. (figured people would want to know this, and you have to scroll a ways to find out, so)

netcraft 12y ago
that was my first question. What page did you see that on? Edit: found it here: http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/ http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/faqs/
- MBlume 12y ago
  > At launch, AWS Lambda will support Node.js code, with support for other languages coming in the future. http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/details/ http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/details/
- sync 12y ago
  The blog also goes into much more detail regarding node integration: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/run-code-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/run-code-cloud/
jakozaur 12y ago
Since Intel already ships CPU for them, maybe they should ask for an CPU with asm.js as their assembly language :-P. The jokes ppl make are starting to get a bit more real: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
pkpp1233 12y ago
This reminds me of Blockspring except they do a bunch of languages.
notastartup 12y ago
I saw it and was shocked that Python is not yet supported.

tomcart 12y ago

Seems like a much more interesting announcement than the container service. Can see the architectures of dozens of our systms collapsing down with this.

derefr 12y ago
At a guess, Container Service was built in order to build this. I.e. Lambda is probably an ECS cluster creating and running Node.js-based Docker containers. (A bit like Heroku's original Ruby stack, actually.) It's a bit amusing to note that they could have built Lambda on top of their own previous Elastic Beanstalk Docker offering instead, but chose to build ECS presumably for cost reasons (which everyone who has evaluated Elastic Beanstalk's Docker support will understand.)

dkarapetyan 12y ago

All these announcement are making me feel sorry for all the other players in the cloud game. The other guys don't even come close.

Karunamon 12y ago
Agreed. However, Amazon's pricing and rather complicated infrastructure means that there will always be a market for people like the DigitalOcean's of the world (I just want a cheap VM, now).
rodgerd 12y ago
I feel sorry for all the people in 5 - 10 years who discover Amazonis now in a position to charge monopoly rents.
- Apoplectic 12y ago
  And yet, they don't. Compare that to Oracle. Plus, when Amazon makes a new cloud architecture that gets popular, others copy it. OpenStack will have this if need be in a year or two and then you can port to OS in 5 years when the rent goes up. Oh, and FWIW, when has AWS raised a price? My servers have gotten cheaper every year I've had them with AWS (3).
  - epowell101 12y ago
    Regarding OpenStack and something similar, there is the underlying workflow service (not quite the same I know) called Mistral. A project called StackStorm that is related but adds event handling and a rule engine launched a couple weeks ago.
tekacs 12y ago
Though several of them run architectures on open technologies, which places them in a different situation entirely.

hackerews 12y ago

You can rip out quite a bit of logic into separate services with this. Will definitely be interesting to see how Lambda actually works. Try out Blockspring, you can play around with your usecase now (and no vendor lock-in).

cperciva 12y ago

Something I want: AWS Lambda code which responds to S3 PUTs by issuing Cloudfront invalidations. Anyone want to write this?

ncallaway 12y ago
I imagine it would be very with the S3 Event Notification stuff they also released today: http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/s3-event-notification/ http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/s3-event-notification/
- cperciva 12y ago
  Yes, exactly. Someone needs to write the code, that's all; I'll do it myself if necessary, but if someone else gets there first all the better.
  - donavanm 12y ago
    Watch out for the limit on the number of concurrent invalidation batches. Youll probably want to scan for "pending" PUT objects and try aggregate them in to an invalidation batch.
    - cperciva 12y ago
      Good point. I guess this would need to be "S3 PUT event triggers code which adds object name to a list and starts a timer"; "timer expiry triggers code which issues a batch invalidate for the list (and empties the list)". I wonder if there's any good way to generate that timer expiry event...
      - donavanm 12y ago
        Hrm, I havent gone through the docs completely but object lifcycle managment on the sentinel/list object?

mathgladiator 12y ago

This is way cool especially considering S3's event notification will enable a ton of interesting workflows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602955

dominotw 12y ago

Would this be useful for build services like setting up a jenkins instance using lambda compute resources as slaves?

saynay 12y ago
It looks like Lambda functions are limited in complexity and runtime duration. The way I see it is pairing it with the container service (ECS) and spawning containers in response to events, possibly spawning EC2 instances if you need more computer. It looks like Lambdas can also be set to execute at a scheduled time, so you could make a delayed Lambda that would shut down any EC2 instances you spawned as well.
willyg302 12y ago
Using Lambda for the slaves is probably not the best idea because, as @saynay mentioned, you couldn't run builds any longer than a few minutes. You could "wrap" a Jenkins fleet running on EC2 with Lambda functions to set up on a build request event and tear down on a build finish event, and theoretically this would reduce the amount of resources you consume if your builds are few and far between. Think of GitHub webhooks triggering Travis CI as an analogy. Whether or not that would actually be useful is debatable.

jlrubin 12y ago

How is this different from CGI?

davidw 12y ago

From a casual glance: it's kind of like Heroku but with Node.js, and it scales automatically?

Zaheer 12y ago

This reminds me of http://www.Webscript.io http://www.Webscript.io Similar single event -> function service

jameshart 12y ago

Claiming that your code is a 'lambda function' makes it sound sexy, but.. isn't it really just a procedure? Unless I'm missing something and there is some higher-ordered capability for composing AWS lambda functions together in a way that permits the platform to perform lambda reductions or optimize resource allocation...

willyg302 12y ago
Lambda function, not lambda function. Capitalization is key (the former is just a brand name). Having reductions and composition would be really cool, but from what I could glean from the demos each function is containerized. Stateless and idempotent like lambda functions, but right now chaining more than one together requires an intermediary event.
gbrits 12y ago
I guess the term 'Lambda' here is taken to mean 'a function without side effects'. So no higher-order chainability, etc. afaik.
- jameshart 12y ago
  Except that it can have side effects, can't it - it can trigger services, cause stuff to be changed in a datastore. It doesn't have any local stateful storage, but it can make use of remote state. In that respect, how is it different from basically any web request processor?
nightpool 12y ago
Lambda is just the brand name.

salimmadjd 12y ago

Amazon Echo (voice interface of IoT) + Amazon Lambda (the cloud services of (IoT) = Amazon disrupting home appliance IoT products.

spitfire 12y ago

I wish they hadn't named the units of computation "Lambda functions". Cause, you know there's already something known as a "Lambda function" in computer science. But kudos for Amazon for furthering the datacenter-is-the-computer approach. It is simply the right thing to do.

erichmond 12y ago
I'm guessing they borrowed it from this : http://lambda-architecture.net/ http://lambda-architecture.net/
- apetresc 12y ago
  I'm not sure what Nathan Marz's "Lambda Architecture" has anything to do with AWS Lambda, though
- turingbook 12y ago
  The Forbes article said it is named after Star Wars space craft: http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/11/13/more-amazonian-announcements-aws-anoints-docker-and-makes-a-nod-towards-star-wars/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2014/11/13/more-amazoni... But I think it is simply named after the functional language feature. The core concept of this service is function.
- bruceboughton 12y ago
  I don't think so. That is another naming abomination.
mehh 12y ago
Really douche to use a computer science term as your product name, are they going to trade mark that or are the just happy with the confusion it will cause.
- codezero 12y ago
  I have a hard time believing there is cause for confusion here, have Physicists been stumped by Amazon Redshift? I'm not being facetious, I just don't see how a product name that is niche to people using Amazon services is likely to confuse people. Also, CS hardly owns the greek letter lambda, it like many greek letters has been used for many products and features over the years. Delta is an airline, but they're doing OK, among others. I am just curious what your issue with this is, and if you can come up with some concrete scenarios where this could really confuse people.

cschmidt 12y ago

> You can use any third party library, even native ones. [1] I realize they are starting with node.js, but I wonder how this will work? It sounds like they plan to support arbitrary dependencies. Will you upload a Docker container with your necessary dependencies? They talk about milliseconds until your code is running, and containers may be (?) slower than that. Or am I hoping for too much. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/details/ http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/details/

tekacs 12y ago
It's definitely possible to do this if you're not set on containers. We do it at http://wym.io/ http://wym.io/ by putting our runtime library in the environment that the code runs in and keeping the runtimes around, keeping the environment clean along the way. We're working towards doing all that (and more than) Lambda does in a deploy-your-own fashion...

adelevie 12y ago

Is this comparable to IronWorker?

sync 12y ago
Yes, seems like a direct competitor to IronWorker to me. IronWorker has a few benefits such as being able to run any docker container and react to a HTTP Post (webhook) directly, but overall very similar to Lambda.
impostervt 12y ago
You can also configure your IronWorker more so than you can a lambda. For instance, I have an IronWorker that requires a library not installed by default, so I use the "deb" command to install it during the build process. And of course, it supports more than just Node.js.
carimura 12y ago
[I'm with Iron.io] Similar, yes. We're excited that developers are seeing the power of the task/worker/lambda being the scalable unit of work rather than server or VM or even container. Haven't used Lambda much yet but off hand we see many IronWorker advantages: - Supports all languages - Easily scale to thousands of parallel workers - Integrated logging, error reporting, alerts, auto-retries on failure - Integration with IronMQ our queue service to achieve stream processing and pipelining - A great dashboard to manage your workers/tasks And many innovations/announcements coming soon that'll make using IronWorker a great choice for developers both on AWS and inside the enterprise firewall.
- jakemcgraw 12y ago
  I recently used iron.io to process around 750K images (generating pHashes for duplicate detection). The service is fantastic.

makmanalp 12y ago

I'm so torn - on one side this is a very neat thing that'll save a lot of boilerplate, and on the other it screams of vendor lock-in.

orange_sharpie 12y ago
that's a REALLY good point! this feature seems really solid, but they seem to be putting a sort-of "golden handcuff" on you. If you have a distributed system on AWS which implements "lambda functions," you can forget about switching to Azure, or your own bare metal servers without having to go through some pain. "vendor lock-in" definitely seems to have been their motto here, very clever & great observation!
vmarsy 12y ago
as MBlume mentionned[1], they seem to support NodeJS. From the FAQ : "At launch AWS Lambda supports code written in Node.js (JavaScript). Your code can include existing Node.js libraries, even native ones." so it seems that you can avoid lock-in if most of your javascript code is not too coupled to Amazon's API And they claim on the detail page: "With AWS Lambda, there are no new languages, tools, or frameworks to learn. You can use any third party library, even native ones. At launch, AWS Lambda will support Node.js code, with support for other languages coming in the future." [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8603059
- mooreds 12y ago
  Err, I think the parent's point wasn't lockin in terms of the code you write, but in terms of your architecture. Setting up your own system driven off of s3 or dynamodb events (if you wanted to move the functions onto your own bare metal) would be a pretty big project.
  - justincormack 12y ago
    ZeroVM lets you run code on Swift, Openstack's S3 clone. Although it is not evented, and they mainly support Python, so it is a way off at present.

marknadal 12y ago

Holy mind blowing awesomeness, this changes everything, yet I feel like this was such an obvious thing to do. So obvious that I can't believe it is real. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why AWS defines the cloud, they are so far beyond everyone else and still innovating, even and the most basic level.

erichmond 12y ago
This idea has existed for years (see storm, samza), but it's great AWS is wrapping the infrastructure piece for those who can't roll their own!

luminati 12y ago

Haven't had much time to read the docs. Sorry if it's already evident, but does it allow for running Lambda code on cron as opposed to listening to some event?

numlocked 12y ago
Yes. From the bottom of TFA: Scheduled Tasks AWS Lambda functions can be triggered by external event timers, so functions can be run during regularly scheduled maintenance times or non-peak hours. For example, you can trigger an AWS Lambda function to perform nightly archive cleanups during non-busy hours.
- luminati 12y ago
  That's great news. Thanks mate.
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    Reliability is my real question around not only this, but lambda as a whole. I'll need to dig into the docs on that.

impostervt 12y ago

I love that it uses Node.js to start, but does it support NPM?

impostervt 12y ago
Looks like yes: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/walkthrough-s3-events-adminuser-create-test-function-create-function.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/walkthrough-s3-e... Now, how to deal with node packages that require libraries not on the default amazon linux ami?
- bradyd 12y ago
  From that example it looks like it doesn't support NPM directly, instead you download the dependencies locally and include the node_modules directory in the zip file you upload. Interestingly the example makes use of ImageMagick, which I don't believe is in the default AMI.

ColinCera 12y ago

I'd pretty much given up on AWS for compute and moved most everything to Linode and some bare metal servers, but this service looks very compelling for discrete compute tasks. The ability to pay only for the fractions of seconds actually used, and the ability to scale quickly without provisioning (or over-provisioning) EC2 instances, is awfully attractive. Plus, Amazon has priced this pretty aggressively — i.e., it looks shockingly cheap.

numlocked 12y ago

Should I think of this essentially as an abstraction that can replace my asynchronous task queue + workers (e.g. RabbitMQ + Celery workers, obviously assuming you aren't using MQ for additional messaging)? I hate managing those pieces and would be happy to hand that infrastructure to Lambda, but are there additional benefits or use cases that are opened up? I guess I would have expected others to describe this the same way ("replaces your distributed task queue"), but since I'm not seeing that description I wonder if I've misunderstood.

crucialfelix 12y ago
Rabbit and celery is the backend system I have now. I was doing a lot of things on demand, event driven, but this resulted in overloading the database ( currently my system constraint ) or in elongating the queue too much. Some event would flood the queue with thousands of tasks. Now I have a periodic task that on each iteration chooses the most pressing task. And the system is stable but I have a bad backlog. So I'd love to have a reactive task system where I didn't have to worry about the resource usage. Think how much precious developer time I've wasted just managing resource expenditures. Much of my coding this week has been just trying to optimize for this stupid constraint. How many processors do I have, how much disk io, is the memory getting close to swapping ? I for one welcome our new cloud overlords.
jberryman 12y ago
I guess maybe part of what you might be missing is that these "Lambda functions" can (will be able to?) be kicked off by all sorts of different AWS events, so it can replace queue + workers where you're generating tasks from your own code, but it might also be able to replace the code that generates those tasks too.
- numlocked 12y ago
  Now that you say it, I'm sure we'll see wrappers to support this type of thing. For instance, I could imagine a django library that provides a declarative way to wire Django signals to AWS Lambda functions. lambda_signal(Model, signal_name, lambda_fn_name) When that signal fired on the model, the model would get serialized to JSON and sent to the lambda function. It'd be fun to whip this up if no one beats me to the punch. lambda_signal(User, 'post_save', 'sync_to_mailchimp')

dk8996 12y ago

Is it me or AWS is releasing too many services... there is a service for everything. I wounder if they are just throwing stuff out there see what sticks... kinda like landing pages.

poxrud 12y ago
To be fair, unlike google they are not cancelling any services. I think Amazon first builds these services for internal use, and then releases them to the public.
- dk8996 12y ago
  We will see. I hope I am wrong but how many of these are production ready? It seems to be that most of them are in preview/beta.
- rifung 12y ago
  As far as I know this isn't the case (used to work across from them)
- Apoplectic 12y ago
  To be fair, you have to pay per unit for these services, so as long as people are using them, Amazon is making money. Putting a service out to pasture in maintenance mode probably wouldn't cost that much.
  - mentat 12y ago
    Maintenance on all of their services is non-trivial in terms of people at least. However if they are used internally, directly or indirectly then they're already paying for it.
jrmcauliffe 12y ago
If you listen to Amazon at their shin-digs, they tell it like all of these new services and features are in response to requests from existing customers.

jbaudanza 12y ago

It would be nice if a lambda could respond to web requests. Maybe an Elastic Loud Balancer could be an "event-source".

tekacs 12y ago
We support exactly this[1]. http://wym.io/ http://wym.io/ Incidentally I almost had a heart attack when I saw the Lambda announcement. :P [1]: We also provide the ability to respond to other kinds of events as does Lambda.
saranagati 12y ago
havent looked too much into it but I dont see why it couldnt. use s3 website, event notification to notify a user accessed a file (web page) and generates a new custom file in your bucket. generated file has some sort of preshared known info between the two in the file name (eg client ip address or cookie). accessed web page either sends back a page reload to the new generated page or just an async page that will render the custom content. edit: oh also delete the generated file once accessed using lambda by either delete on get notification or just a lambda scheduled event.

notastartup 12y ago

What about dependencies. What if you need a specific environment setup first in order to process. Would you end up paying 1 minute for each request just so that it can start installing bunch of stuff? Is it possible to just setup a VM of some sort and use that environment each time? If thats possible Lambda would be like PiCloud but without Python, and will stick around (hopefully).

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debaserab2 12y ago

I'm excited for this. This replaces what I wanted to use SQS for. SQS always felt like too much vendor lock-in to me to justify not using something like RabbitMQ or Beanstalkd. With Lambda, the resource consuming the queue is managed for me - that is huge. Also, the pay by time model is perfect for this - instead of managing when to stop/start resource intensive instances, I don't even have to think about the problem. I only get charged what I used, which can be crucial during growth stages of a business or prototype. The big penalty is the vendor lock-in, but this tips the scales for me for certain things.

crescentfresh 12y ago
> *the resource consuming the queue Are you referring to kinesis as the queue here? Sqs/sns are not (yet?) supported as event generators for lambda.

hcarvalhoalves 12y ago

Full-circle back to mainframe era.

deleted 12y ago
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turingbook 12y ago

Werner Vogels's blog about Lambda: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/aws-lambda.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/aws-lambda.html

GIFtheory 12y ago

Sounds a bit like Mirage OS to me (http://www.openmirage.org http://www.openmirage.org).

yohanatan 12y ago
Nope, nothing at all like that.

nivertech 12y ago

Does AWS Lambda supports cron-like periodic triggers?

epowell101 12y ago
Yes.

james33 12y ago

It sounds like this is essentially what Joyent's Manta is, which we've been using in production for the last year and have found to be absolutely fantastic. Are there differences that I'm not seeing?

nivertech 12y ago
It's not. The name is confusing. Especially when you hear AWS Lambda and DynamoDB/S3 in the same sentence.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

This looks quite interesting, and a lot more fun to work with than maintaining a pool of servers ready to handle events and spinning up new ones based on capacity. Anyone know of any similar mechanisms for the OpenStack world, or more generally for any cloud infrastructure other than AWS?

motoboi 12y ago

AWS Lambda announcement video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eHoyUVo-yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eHoyUVo-yg

Apoplectic 12y ago

Huh? Shared server infrastructure? That's really what this sounds like. Welcome to web hosting in 1999 guys. Most of the point of AWS was that you have your own dedicated resources. Sure, this is a scaling solution, but revolutionary?

ceejayoz 12y ago
> Welcome to web hosting in 1999 guys. Sorry, where were you getting servers in 1999 that existed for fractions of a second?
- Apoplectic 12y ago
  Ain't a 'server' boss. They're running a segment of code. When someone hits your PHP page on an oversubscribed DreamHost box with 4000 other sites contending for resources, it's pretty much the same thing. Here we're getting some dedicated CPU/Mem, but it ain't a 'server.' Where's the dedicated disk and ability to install/run whatever I want? Nope, just a lil segment of JS running on a shared resource and billed in 100ms increments.

hendry 12y ago

I tweeted that it's a PITA to transcoded uploaded media yesterday and today AWS solve the problem! I HAVE THE POWER https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/532783437225025537 https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/532783437225025537

sly010 12y ago

IaaS -> PaaS slowly but surely

riobard 12y ago

How is it different from Google App Engine? Conceptually the two seem very similar to me, that is, developers do not have to worry about the underling infrastructure at all---just write code and deploy.

willyg302 12y ago
As a tldr, not-quite-right distinction, GAE is more of a platform whereas Lambda is more of a service. I feel that GAE is a much more generalized solution for building/deploying applications, e.g. it's very integrated with BigTable and has caching/cron/queuing support. To a point you do not have to worry about the infrastructure, but write any GAE app at scale and soon you'll run into questions of caching some content and optimizing DB writes. Whereas Lambda, at least right now, is a more specific use case: respond to an event by running some code. It's too early to tell whether managing Lambda functions will require fine-tuning the "advanced settings" (in all honesty it probably will) but it seems like it's much simpler.

waitingkuo 12y ago

How can it compare to zappier?

epowell101 12y ago
Or StackStorm? Or https://factor.io/ https://factor.io/ I think much much more intra application wiring as opposed to inter app / tool chain wiring. Or?

hyperliner 12y ago

I finally have stored procedures and triggers for my DynamoDB database!

amelius 12y ago

One difficult part of doing event triggered processing is in the progress reporting and keeping the code related to it simple. I wonder how they deal with that.

squidcactus28 12y ago

How to get this on private cloud?

rajatchopra 12y ago

Good stuff. Basically it seems to do the bind+listen for you if you are the trigger subscriber. If you are the trigger generator, then it does socket.write for you. But the big deal is that you dont pay for 'listen', just pay for the function execution. The one thing that will surely happen with this is that the code written will be 'locked in' to run only on aws territory.