Browser Functions: A serverless platform using Web Browser execution engines | Hacker News Reader

Browser Functions: A serverless platform using Web Browser execution engines

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Wouldn't it be very memory inefficient? A browser "tab" isn't exactly a small amount of resource. And I remember there were quite a few problems with headless browser not being perfect ( Although I think that was quite a while ago so things might have improved )

However I do love the idea of Browser Function! It has been a long time since I have been excited with any Web Development tech. So I just need some time to sink in my excitement.

Chrome seems to handle memory quite well in headless mode at any rate. The memory footprint isn't tiny, but it seems a fair bit smaller than the container based approaches used by other serverless systems.

Isn't this still wrapped in a container. I would assume a commercial deployment would need this isolation - after all chrome allows toggling feature flags, which could bleed across instances if not containerized.

The big benefit to this approach is the availability of WebApis in a Faas environment.

I don't think you need the extra layer of isolation. Browser tabs are isolated pretty well if they are running different sites. Chrome's spectre mitigations will also help to isolate functions from one another https://security.googleblog.com/2018/07/mitigating-spectre-w...

This sounds similar to how Cloudflare Workers work - using the V8 isolate technology built for Chrome to provide secure isolation of backend processes without the overhead of VMs or even containers.

Yes. This is something like Cloudflare Workers (except we built a deep embedding of V8 rather than relying on the browser infrastructure).

https://workers.cloudflare.com/

Plus we have a distributed KV store to go with the code execution environment.

Our main reason for relying on the full browser is to not be tied to a specific browser engine, and to be able to benefit from browser security updates really easily, but there are obviously some challenges to this approach.

Makes sense. Certainly not dissing your approach!

What a brilliant idea... almost a Why Didn't I Think of That Idea!

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