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Comment by hassy | Hacker News Reader

The power of Lambda comes from being able to use other AWS services. Lambdas on their own are not very interesting.

A true Lambda alternative, open-source or otherwise, would also have to offer alternatives to DynamoDB, S3, SNS/SQS etc. Without those you're basically reinventing CGI.

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It's a godsend for me, and I don't use anything else on AWS. The value is that I can run arbitrary programs written in any language, and have it automatically scale up without having to think about VM instances. In my case there's a single (quite complex, cpu intensive) commandline C program that I need to run between zero and hundreds of on demand - I haven't found anything else that lets me do that.

Out of curiosity, what does your C program do? I don't imagine yours is a typical use case if you don't use any other services (not even S3?) and when you consider that you're limited to 300 seconds of running time and not more than 100 concurrent executions.

I'm going to be purposefully vague to avoid doxxing myself, but it's a lot like the "run" button that compiles the code on the Rust homepage, the difference being that the compiler I'm running is too performance critical to use Emscripten ATM.

What are you using to call your C program? I've been considering possibly a python wrapper?

Yes, did some research and found that the Python run time is the fastest to start up of the various options - all it really does is start up, call the C program, then shut down (<10ms to get to the subprocess.call() if memory serves).

I've been giving some thought to an AWS Lambda equivalent on Joyent Triton (largely because it's open source). You'd have RethinkDB (DynamoDB), Manta (S3), your choice of queue, TensorFlow, etc. I'm generally a huge fan of the Joyent engineering ethos (not affiliated, just a fan).

Python 3.5 with DTrace probes in an AWS Lambda equivalent would be sweet.

Something running on Kubernetes is probably going to get more traction at this point than something running on Triton. 1.2 added a task API, probably not high performance enough yet for this, but I think it's only a matter of time till the ability to execute ad hoc tasks is a core platform expectation.

All of those services have very valid Open Source alternative, why be locked in a closed environment ?

So the point of Lambda is that you don't have to run any infrastructure.

If Lambda had an open source equivalent, the "other pieces" are also needed to make it useful. The "Open Sourceness" is only one factor in that environment - it is at least as important that you can somehow call them from a stateless service and get adequate performance.

That tends to push towards all the services being run in the same environment (although it doesn't have to be like that - it's just easier)

Because you now either have to run those open-source alternatives yourself or be at the mercy of another vendor to provide those for your as a service, and personally my trust in pretty much any other vendor would be much lower than my trust in AWS by default.

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