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Comment by netcraft | Hacker News Reader

I recently have started looking harder at lambda after realizing that you can use 1M requests / month for free indefinitely. I just worry about vendor lock-in with services like this - if for whatever reason you want to move away its a rewrite at best. If amazon was to open source the lambda implementation allowing me to run my services somewhere else with a config change id probably buy into it completely and never move away...

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I've used node-lamba to help with this:

https://github.com/motdotla/node-lambda

I write/test locally and then deploy to AWS with a single command. The lock-in is helped by the fact that (a) the touchpoints and interface/interaction of AWS Lambda are pretty simple and (b) I could spin up a production version of node-lambda too.

The code deployment side is helped by using S3 as an interim place to upload and deploy packages from. The CLI makes that nice and easy once set-up.

If Lambda open sourced the engine, but didn't make it super easy (as in a 1-button deploy, nothing intentional) to stand up your own stand alone Lambda service, would that be better?

On my projects that have been open sourced, we mostly open sourced to make debugging easier and make extension authoring easier. I've gotten comments from people that that makes them feel easier about vendor lock in, but honestly, I haven't seen many people try and stand up their own service. Would you say that matches your own expectations?

yeah pretty much. I don't want to move, I want to have the ability to if something goes bad.

We’ve also been hacking away in the same space with StackHut (http://www.stackhut.com) - build stateless & ephemeral microservices in Python and JS that are deployed as cloud APIs for access over JSON-RPC; with simple type-checking, dependencies, shelling out to any other code/binaries, and more.

Most code is open-sourced at http://www.github.com/StackHut and we're working on making it easily deployable on your own hardware.

If you are worried about vendor lock-in, I built an open-source alternative to lambda: https://hook.io

Even without the free allotment, it would only cost ~$7/month to use 1M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds.

I work for a similar service, Iron.io. We're platform agnostic, but closed source.

Can't tell if that ticks your boxes or not. If you're interested we're free to try.

usually, you use one lambda for one specific need. get the request, do the work and return the response. I did not see how can be locked. the concern for me is the limitation of uploaded file size.

Check out JAWS, it has Lambda optimization built in. It browserifies and minifies your code before deploying it. You will regularly see 20mb files shrink to 100kb.

https://github.com/jaws-framework/JAWS

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