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Comment by emteycz | Hacker News Reader

Considering your long experience, didn't you feel like we lost a lot post-PHP? I also stepped out of the PHP world into JS, and never understood why there isn't any apache2-modnodejs... And to me, the serverless JS movement seems to be just that, but with a lot of unnecessary baggage.

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We surely picked up some baggage. Much of it vendor specific. But also we jettison some? You stick a lambda into API gateway and you're on the internet. No servers. No linux setup. No apache conf.

I'd encourage you to dive in for 20 hours in pure curiosity mode and see what you find.

It's great for a lot of use cases ... But unfortunately there is several important points that prevents to use this combo as a silver bullet.

API gateway is limited to 29 sec of execution, if you need anything longer you will need an EC2 instance (or ECS or fargate) to act as a webserver and call the lambda (up to 15 min), cloudfront is also not an option for this comon use case because it's limited to 180 sec.

Lambda is a proprietary solution that only works for people on AWS. Linux is open, and I just need to put it on a box. How do I install the AWS Lambda stack on a standard Linux box?

You can't.

Are you actually asking this question?

Or you pretending to ask a question because you think the fact that AWS Lambda run on AWS is some huge gotcha that I never imagined and no one would ever tolerate?

I explicitly note vendor-specific baggage. AWS revenue is over 45 billion annually and half of customers use lambda.

My point is that the industry really hasn't moved on from the old LAMP stack if it's been replaced by a single company. When it truly comes down to it, the day-to-day tools are not ours if they aren't open.

And if deploying a lambda function on my own hardware is vastly more complex, then the tools haven't really changed, they just got outsourced.

There are a bunch of semi-standards like Serverless Framework and Knative, but nothing concrete.

> And if deploying a lambda function on my own hardware is vastly more complex, then the tools haven't really changed, they just got outsourced.

Well... Yeah?

I came into web development in 97. Back then almost everything was on shared servers, so pretty much the same thing.

I agree the tools got outsourced.

I also agree there are big chunks of LAMP under the covers of running an AWS Lambda. So, in that sense, we haven't "moved on" from the old LAMP stack.

I also agree the tools are "not ours" if they aren't open. They do useful things. It's a tradeoff.

Perhaps a different road to the same problem but on K8s it’s really simple to install a FaaS (e.g., Kubeless and others) provider and get the same benefits. Different metrics sure, but the approach to getting deployable runtimes is the same (if using Serverless framework for example).

Of course then you need a cluster which may be back at AWS as EKS (or not) but at least it’s more open from that perspective.

Openstack?

https://www.openstack.org/

Lambda gets you back to the one request per process model that made php so easy to reason about and performance flat. With normally deployed JavaScript and single process concurrency, callbacks could all complete at same time and all block waiting to get cpu time to complete the request.

I've been doing software for maybe 25 years. We gained a lot of control and ownership, thanks to FLOSS, 15-20 years ago and then lost a lot.

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