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Comment by zelly | Hacker News Reader

You can still get "scale to 0" with cgi-bin applications. Yes, it's old (but it works). Yes, it's slow (so is Lambda).

Unlike Lambda, CGI works on any web server and any OS. It's also extremely easy to mock because the input and output is stdin/stdout, not AWS API invocations that cost money every time you run.

What you miss out on is "scale to infinity" (read: your bill goes to infinity too).

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I recall when AWS first released Lambdas I thought of cgi-bin, especially with PHP where the deployment model is just pushing files. As you say, it has pretty much the same upsides and downsides.

That model does scale well for the web layer at least. Just lots of cheap VPS nodes. Of course, the bottleneck then is the database or whatever layer provides state and persistence.

I think the main selling point of Lambda (and most SaaS) is you don't have to worry about the machine running your code. Personally I haven't used it so correct me if I'm wrong but you don't have to worry about things like monitoring, network administration and security (beyond your code and general opsec).

Yeah, FastCGI is a little closer since it fixes the startup time problem.

It's weird to me that PHP uses FastCGI but Python support for it is really limited. I'm using FastCGI on Dreamhost and it was a pain to get it to work.

https://lobste.rs/s/9o4zsx/back_70s_with_serverless#c_9hxzjs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24683304

CGI and FastCGI can also be used with containers, although it appears that almost nobody does it.

I think if "bubblewrap" (user space container tool) starts to be installed on shared hosts via Red Hat, we could hack it.

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