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Comment by rabbyte | Hacker News Reader

This is jawsome. I feel like you're cheating on the "no server" bit with some AWS semantics but you're not the first so, whatever, nice job.

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Thanks!

But seriously, there aren't any servers. There is a local development server included, to help you code your web site locally. But, it's not a server you use for production.

Much of my time as a developer is spent deploying/configuring/monitoring/managing/scaling/paying for servers. I'm tired of that. Further, I'm broke. AWS Lambda and on-demand cloud computing in general can reduce and eliminate a lot of that.

Much love for servers, much love for containers, but AWS is putting out technologies that are more efficient. The goal of JAWS is to help everyone take advantage of this new tech.

It's awesome to see this because I've been planning on doing something very similar for a future project. The only major difference between what I was envisioning is that I was still going to have a few EC2 servers to maintain WebSocket connections to the client as I want near-instant responsiveness. Another minor difference is that I was planning on using a static site hosting provider like Netlify to host static content since it's a) cheaper and b) automatically uses a CDN.

But my worry has been on the performance side of Lambda...that near-instant feel is going to be compromised if there's much latency introduced and I still haven't done any performance testing to see how much latency Lambda introduces. Have you done any exploration along these lines? In particular, I'll need to figure out what the consistent overhead is and how often Lambda doesn't reuse previous instances and forces db reconnects and the like.

It's no server because Lambda is not a server like VPS that you get it up and running 24 hours, it's a service that gets a call and runs your function. You don't have a server up it's a function on the backend. It's being called by the JS SDK on the browser, therefore no server, plain static + function calling architecture.

Best,

Isn't App Engine no server by the same metric? You could make an autoscaling app engine module with some HTTP handlers and it seems like you have the same thing.

This is roughly what Tailbone does: https://github.com/dataarts/tailbone

Yup.

> It's no server because Lambda is not a server like VPS that you get it up and running 24 hours,

What you say makes no sense. There is a server , you just don't manage it yourself.

> it's a function on the backend

And where is the "backend" ? that's right , on a server.

> It's being called by the JS SDK on the browser,

What does the SDK call ? a server when your functions lie.

Lambda + api gateway are a BAAS. You might have some logic running in the browser but the lambda functions run @AWS. So there is a server.

It's a bit like Couch Apps by the way,except that you can scale at the 'design document level', not just at the 'node level'.

It's "no servers" for the developer in the sense that there is zero infrastructure to manage, configure or deploy. This is popularly known as a "PaaS" or platform as a service, ala Heroku and similar providers.

> What you say makes no sense. There is a server , you just don't manage it yourself.

Specifically, each Lambda function is a containerized app...

You're not paying for a server being up for you 24/7, you're not managing a server, you don't worry about what's being provisioned. That's what "no server" means, yes everybody knows there's a server! There's no magic hat tricks! It's just a new trend word now :), say "no server"

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