Show HN: Fx - Poor man's serverless framework | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Fx - Poor man's serverless framework

github.com

53 pointsmetrue19 comments

Sorry if I mistunderstand. The readme is very limited. But this need a (vps or something) server that I own / manage ? It does not seem to upload the functions(s) to some cloud ?

In general I think 'serverless' means deploying code without managing some kind of server yourself.

It's a poor man's readme

Get your roomie to deploy it. Then it's serverless to you.

Your guys are so right about fx’s ‘Poor man’s README, I will update it soon. Long story short, you can deploy fx on a host (cloud or localhost), then you can deploy a function to be a service in few seconds, just like AWS lambda ( but Poor man’s lambda).

Even the README says you need to start a server. So it’s not quite serverless.

(“Serverless”, at least to me, means a platform where I don’t have to worry about running servers.)

I think serverless refers to the use of 'lamdas' as the unit of deployment, as oppose to containers or VM's, but someone else may want to add/edit that.

README is not quiet clear, but for my understanding, lambda is kinda thing that helps you to do serverless, but lambda is also running on some kind of server maintained by AWS, right? fx is kind of lambda, but owned by yourself.

Well, yes, you can run your own server to provide yourself a serverless platform, but it kind of defeats the purpose... Since then you end up having to maintain your server anyway.

I suppose there may be a point to it if the serverless platform is extremely stable and never has any security issues or other things to update.

Well, the server is abstracted away and vanishes in a puff of logic, you see.

Isn't this just `up`?

https://github.com/apex/up

It looks like up for running something like express/koa/etc while fx is for functions (like AWS Lambda). They are both "serverless" but that's about all they share in common AFAICT. Thanks for mentioning "up" though, I'd never heard of it before, very cool.

`up` looks like it only runs on AWS. This seems nice as the only requirement is docker and I can run it on my $3USD VPS

Yep it uses AWS Lambda currently, you'll usually end up paying < $1 for small side projects such as https://gh-polls.com/ etc, but it definitely depends on your traffic.

This project looks like it's more FaaS style (sans the self-healing / autoscaling etc). Up is more application oriented, it just happens to use Lambda.

Where do you get such a cheap VPS? I'm paying $5!

I pay $2.5 per month here: https://www.vultr.com/?ref=7195281

I've had good experiences with Vultr as well. I'm surprised they're not more popular.

Joyent offers very small and very efficient instances. I haven't paid $5 per instance in years.

But this one's written in... Oh.

are you suggesting it's similar, or that it's a fork, or something else?

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