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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Just the opposite of serious for me.

Example: there's a website for all the weather radar stations in Canada that lets you see the last two hours of 10-minute radar snapshots. I wanted a dump of them to try some ML algorithms, but even after requests and emails there simply wasn't one.

So I set up a lambda to run every hour, load the website for all 31 weather stations and save all 6 images from the last hour to S3.

It took me an hour to setup. I've never gotten around to making that ML project, but lambda has kept on chugging away for me, GBs of data saved away. The only real cost is the s3 storage, still under $2/month.

Serverless is brilliant for little things like that.

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I use a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian for things like these. It's a really cheap one-time cost (ignoring power costs, which are fairly minor), and you can setup all sorts of things on it. If you don't need high availability, running a small system at home can often be a good solution.

The initial learning curve for running your own system is a bit higher, but I think it's well worth learning. Once you have the system up and running you start finding all sorts of uses for it. So if you need it for just one thing it might not be worth it, but as you start doing more things with it I think it really pays off.

This is brilliant! I hadn't yet found any reason to mess with Raspberry Pis. But the way you've described it makes a lot of sense. They'd definitely be a maintenance overhead, uptime wouldn't be guaranteed but I can imagine the sense of self-sufficiency you'd get would be very satisfying.

Same. I setup an AppEngine cron to call a Google Cloud Function every 8 hours to invoke an API and persist on GitHub all for free[0].

0 - https://github.com/cretz/badads

As someobe new to serverless, is your code available to study as a pseudo tutorial?

I have a boilerplate app / tutorial here:

https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas

If you are into python I highly recommend Zappa. It turns your flask app endpoints into lambda functions + API gateway. The big benefit here is that it is trivial to test locally because before it gets transformed you can just do 'flask run' and use postman to test the endpoints

'Serverless' is an adjective. I'm happy to trade some Internet Points™ for the chance to point that out.

Good example of a suitable use case, thanks for sharing.

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