Hacker News Reader

I fully agree with your take. I think JS-directed computation is very good towards short-term adoption (since running JS on the Edge is probably the most popular use case), but eventually the needs to run other programming languages at the Edge will likely eclipse the JS use case.

At Wasmer [1] we have been working actively towards this future. Lately more companies have been also doing awesome work on these fronts: Lunatic, Suborbital, Cosmonic (WasmCloud) and Fermyon (Spin). However, each of us with a different take/vision on how to approach the future of Computation at the Edge. I'm very excited about to see what each approach will bring into the table.

[1] https://wasmer.io/

> a fraction of the overhead of a container

I mean, only in theory or when looking at it from the right angle, right? Or are you only comparing against JavaScript (unclear)? WASM is still much slower than native code. Containers spend most of their time executing native code; the "overhead" of containers is at the boundaries and is minor compared to the slowdown by moving from native code to WASM. In the future WASM may approach native performance, but it's not there now. I'm 100% certain that transitioning my native-code-in-containers workloads to WASM would be slower, not faster.

Edge functions are typically run intermittently, with their runtime stopped to free up resources between runs. Therefore a big factor is startup and shutdown speed. Containers are pretty bad there. Deno is better, and WASM is unbeatable, especially with things like Wizer[0].

[0]https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wizer

Deno can in theory do the pre-initialization that wizer does for JS too. We have all of the infrastructure for it, we just have not gotten around to actually implementing it yet.

Issue 3335. I know. I'm watching it. :))

Makes sense when talking about edge functions, but then OP started talking about Kubernetes. Our Kubernetes workloads don't resemble that at all; there's virtually none of that container startup/shutdown overhead to be concerned about. Most weeks, no containers are started or stopped at all.

Also a common spec for serverless is badly needed. Serverless code should be portable between different cloud providers, otherwise there's vendor lock in and much greater opportunity to price gouge.

Anybody know if a common API for serverless components is being worked on?

Check out knative, it’s used for Google Cloud Run: https://knative.dev/docs/

What is the common spec for Knative? It seems like one runs an app as normal in a container and then the special scaling sauce is handled by Knative.

When I think of a portable spec for serverless, I think of something more like a Trait of an Interface that needs to be implemented, less a app hosting model. If you think about it like that, then Web Assembly component model [1] would be a great fit for defining an interface that could be implemented in a variety of languages.

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

Yes, exactly. Of course experimentation and competition is good to settle on a solid set of building blocks, but in the long run serverless code should absolutely be portable between vendors.

There's a strong incentive for vendors to not allow this as it reduces their pricing power... But think we will see it eventually one way or another.

That would only be implementable by languages with a WASM output target though. Knative says that any container that responds to HTTP will work, and you could host those in different environments. It's much more general.

There's the serverless framework which is easy to use and there is terraform which is more powerful.

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/927/

It doesn’t avoid vendor lock-in. Instead of a cloud provider, it is now Terraform.

The problem is database. Distributed serverless-first SQL like spanner, Cockroach, PlanetScale are very very expensive.

We're building PolyScale[1] to address this problem. PolyScale is a serverless edge cache for databases so you can easily distribute your reads.

We are opening up early access to our connection pooling features in the next couple of weeks which allows FaaS platforms like Netlify, Cloudflare etc to create large numbers of ephemeral connections, without impacting your origin database, as well as reducing connection latency significantly.

[1] https://www.polyscale.ai/

I was looking at the polyscale docs and found following

  PolyScale evaluates each SQL query in real-time and when it detects a DML query i.e. a SQL INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE, it extracts the associated tables for the query. Then, all data for the table(s) in question are purged from the cache, for every region globally.

at https://docs.polyscale.ai/how-does-it-work/#smart-invalidati...

Isn't clearing cache for entire tables for a all DMLs which may be changing one record too intensive and how does this affect performance of cache when there are multiple DML queries being run every minute?

Also can you please give the docs link to connection pooling feature

That’s right. Currently the auto invalidation is somewhat of a blunt instrument in that it will blow away all cache data related to the table(s) as default. That approach favors consistency over performance, but is also a natural fit to some query traffic patterns. You can also switch it off if you so desire. The next iteration that is imminent for release can be much more surgical, invalidating based on more of the query details.

Connection pooling docs are coming soon as part of the feature early access launch. Feel free to drop me an email and I can let you know when its released. Im ben at our domain.

Really, really dumb question. I've seen a lot of node/python/etc serverless offerings. Is there something where you just provide a binary and its executed each time?

For example, I write a simple single responsibility piece of code in Go `add_to_cart.go` and build it, deploy it, and somehow map it to some network request. dot slash pass args, and return the result?

No need to have containers or runtime?

That's how every FaaS (Function as a Service) offering works.

A caveat is that most non trivial applications need something more than running a function.

You might need secrets management, ephemeral and non ephemeral storage, relational databases, non relational databases, dependency management, AAA capabilities, observability, queues/async, caching, custom domains... That's where said offerings differ.

EDIT: actually most FaaS offerings take code as input, not binaries. I'm not sure if that was the relevant part of your question. If it was, then yeah I don't know of such service.

You can do that on Lambda: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/golang-handler....

AWS still needs the container/runtime to stop your code getting access to other things on the same physical computer.

Find a cheap apache web host that allows cgi-bin.

This is exactly what we are building at TinyFunction.com Just write your function code in Javascript or Python in the browser and click deploy to get a URL. Take a look at https://TinyFunction.com

Appreciate any suggestions or feedback.

Site no loading on my phone. Just a white screen with a green comment button. That’s really cool though that you’re going to build something like that, wish you all the best!

It's possible you'd run into environment issues. JS or Python code (or a container) doesn't have to care as much what OS or architecture it's run on. A raw binary could pierce that abstraction and make the service more complicated to offer.

AWS lambda’s work that way.

I agree about WASM. I am sort of worried that Deno may be too late tbh. Why would I bother with an interpreted language at all when I can code in any language I want and run it anywhere with WASM?

The "any language" advantage of WASM is theoretical. Each language is at a different level of support of WASM, libraries aren't all caught up and at the same point for all languages, etc...

I love the promise of WASM, but every time I look at it I get lost in a sea of acronyms, and my optimistic ideas of using language X with library Y on runtime Z are dashed because there is some missing piece somewhere.

If anything, the "any language" thing creates a giant matrix of potential pitfalls for the programmer.

In comparison, the combination of JS/TS, the browser API and a solid std lib looks pretty good for some problems.

Agreed. There is also the lack of a GC in WASM and Denos' use of existing web standard APIs.

What is "any language" these days? I feel like WebAssembly's day will come when one of those is Javascript, and so far that hasn't happened.

Go's support is pretty good (with tinygo offering a tiny runtime more suited to this application). Rust appears to support compiling directly to WebAssembly, and there are some smaller languages like AssemblyScript and Lua with support. I'm guessing plain C works fine. Then there are projects that compile the runtime for interpreted languages to WebAssembly, so you can theoretically run things like Python.

Nobody is writing applications in C or AssemblyScript, so that leaves rust or go. If you're using one of those languages, though, you can just (cross-)compile a binary and copy it to a VM that is on some cloud provider's free tier, so this isn't really easing any deployment woes. It was already as easy with native code, so WebAssembly isn't adding much stuff here. (The isolation aspect was interesting in the days before Firecracker, but now every computer has hardware virtualization extensions and so you can safely run untrusted native code in a VM at native speeds.)

Anyway, I always wanted WebAssembly for two things: 1) To compile my React apps to a single binary. 2) To use as a plugin system for third-party apps (so I don't have to recompile Nginx to have OpenTracing support, for example). The language support hasn't really enabled either, so I'm a little disappointed. (Disappointed isn't really fair. I've invested no effort in this, and I can't be disappointed that someone didn't make a really complicated thing for me for free. But you know what I mean.)

> The isolation aspect was interesting in the days before Firecracker...

I don't think Firecracker's existence makes WASM's isolation uninteresting. First, I think you are looking at way more resources running a full VM (even a "micro" VM) compared to a WASM runtime. I think startup times are not comparable either, so if that matters you'll find WASM to be the way to go.

Second, WASM's capability-based security model is wonderful for giving the untrusted code the things it needs to work with. With a VM, you have to stitch together with shared directories, virtual eth bridges or, linux capabilities, maybe some cgroups, and who knows what else. (Granted you may need to do some of that with WASM too, but less so).

WASM still needs an interface layer to interact with the outside world (filesystem, etc.) My money is on WASI, but Deno becoming the interface layer has some advantages, mainly that most WASM-supporting languages already have tooling around JavaScript ffi.

Deno supports wasm. :p

You can write Cloudflare Workers in WASM today.

As far as I can tell from the outside, that's still "WASM-called-by-Javascript", and many of their JS optimizations don't work the same way. E.g. if a Worker calls JS `fetch` and returns that `Response`, they recognize that and remove the JS from the data path; same is not true for WASM at this time.

I think that optimization should still work when using Wasm, unless the Wasm code does something silly like manually pump the stream (read from one, write to the other), but I think you'd have to go out of your way to do that, and anyway the same is true of pure-JavaScript code.

Ooh, that is great news. I've been itching to write a "proxy thing" in Rust instead of JS.

Hmmm I had a look into WASM runtimes and the idea seems interesting to deploy something on a server as a lightweight execution environment (I think of Firecracker from AWS for VMs).

To be honest on the server side of things containers are so nice because 99% of the time they include all your dependencies you need to run the app.

> I'm really rooting for a successful trend of Serverless runtimes, mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs.

How would that work? Don't these tend to facilitate cloud lock-in or at least be cloud-only in the sense that they make it hard to operate your own metal infrastructure?

There is KNative for that. But really folks are using serverless to _not_ have to operate their own iron and save themselves an ops team.

Sure. Just saying those savings only work if the cloud vendors are in fact charging reasonable rates on serverless compute, storage, and bandwidth. In my experience cloud vendors love to tow that line but if you do the math the savings over DIY are sometimes questionable. It depends on your work load.

Fastly use WASM for their Edge Compute offering

in what world is serverless cheaper?

The one where you only need a few invocations and with serverless: aren’t paying for an idling VM all of the other time. Arguably you may save yourself an ops team too.

> mainly as a weapon against rising cloud deployment costs.

Cloud Functions is literally code you're running in the cloud. And the moment you approach their limit(ation)s, you will see the same "rising cloud deployment costs"

> Running a WASM engine on the cloud means ... a fraction of the overhead of a container or nodejs environment

You do realise that there are other languages than javascript in nodejs? That there other environments than cloud functions? And that you can skip that overhead entirely by running with a different language in a different environment? Or even run Rust in AWS Lambda if you so wish?

> so there’s no lock-in with the language that the Serverless provider mandates.

And at the same time you're advertising for a runtime lock in. This doesn't compute.

> Web pages that are as ancient as the early 90s are perfectly rendered even today... Basically, it means a WASM binary is future proof by default.

It's not future proof.

Web Pages from the 90s are not actually rendered perfectly today because browsers didn't agree on a standard rendering until late 2000s, and many web pages from the 90s and 2000s were targeting a specific browser's feature set and rendering quirks. Web Pages from the 90s are rendered good enough (and they had few things to render to begin with).

As web's standards approach runaway asymptotical complexity, their "future-proofness" is also also questionable. Chrome broke audio [1], browsers are planning to remove alert/confirm/prompt [2], some specs are deprecated after barely seeing the light of day [3], some specs are just shitty and require backtracking or multiple additional specs on top to fix the most glaring holes, etc.

> I've published my (ranty) notes on why Serverless will eventually replace Kubernetes as the dominant software deployment technique

"Let's replace somewhat unlimited code with severely limited, resource constrained code running in a slow VM in a shared instance" is not a good take.

[1] https://www.usgamer.net/articles/google-chromes-latest-updat...

[2] https://dev.to/richharris/stay-alert-d

[3] https://chromestatus.com/feature/4642138092470272 and https://www.w3.org/TR/html-imports/

I sought to unserstand "serverless" but every deployment diagram I have ever seen show things that look an aweful lot like they run on... servers?

Maybe I don't get the idea (and honestly I was too lazy to put in the legwork), but when I hear something like "serverless" I imagine some p2p javascript federated decentralized beast where the shared state is stored through magic and tricks with the users clients and there is literally no server anywhere to be found.

Instead it seems like a buzzword (?) for a weirdly niche way of running things that someone with a 4 Euro/Month nginx instance that hosts 10 websites will probably never understand.

Maybe I also don't need to understand because I know how to leverage static content, caching, fast Rust reverse proxy services and client side javascript to develope fast web stuff that gets the job done).

> Instead it seems like a buzzword (?) for a weirdly niche way of running things that someone with a 4 Euro/Month nginx instance that hosts 10 websites will probably never understand.

To me, serverless means that I as the developer don't have to do ongoing server maintenance work. A 4 Euro/month setup sounds great, until you find out that you never enabled log rotation and filled up the disk space, or your certificate refresh was improperly configured and now you don't have SSL, or your site gets popular for a day and the site slows to a crawl unless you add an instance.

The dream of serverless is that I can deploy code in a “set it and forget it” manner. Stuff can still break at the application layer, but should work the same at the infrastructure layer in a year as they do today, and auto-scaling happens automatically.

> but should work the same at the infrastructure layer in a year

Serious doubt, there. This brave new world seems to be entirely focused on making it an incredibly fragile world with your code scattered to the winds. It's bad enough dealing with library semver breakages in a monolithic app. I can't imagine tracking a dozen serverless functions running god-knows-where with whatever resources some cloud service decides to allocate for you today. Billing is opaque as a black hole. Which I'm sure is more a feature than a bug, for these cloud providers.

> and auto-scaling happens automatically.

wheeze

> but should work the same at the infrastructure layer in a year

It's been my experience. For example, I've had periodic data fetching jobs last for years without giving them any thought. In some cases I've gone back years later and found them still chugging away, obediently putting data where I told them to years earlier. The one exception I can think of is when Lambda EOL'd Python 2.7, but that happened about 12 years after Python 3's initial release.

I've found the same to be true of web services. I have one that's been running continuously for 5+ years that I actually forgot about until just now.

> wheeze

Why?

Agreed, my company focuses on writing business logic that actually provides value to our customers, spends roughly 0 time configuring web infrastructure, and everything just works, our cloud costs are dirt cheap (especially when compared to cost of labor), the performance is better than if we had used a traditional server since code is being run on servers very near our users rather than a fixed location, and we save time, stress and money by not needing to hire cynical, behind the times sysadmins like deckard1.

Maybe that wouldn’t be the case if my company wasn’t a B2B SaaS that isn’t constrained by being the scaling concerns of a mass market consumer web app (specifically one that couldn’t scale via smart caching policies, which honestly is a minority of use cases), but for our use case it makes plenty of sense.

If you’re worried about cost overruns from auto scaling, you just set a billing limit and deal with it when you get close. Anyway the code we push to serverless is literally just the business logic we would have written anyway so there’s virtually no platform lock-in. And honestly my serverless costs are so cheap that it’ll be a long while before we bother touching them.

But where does the code run physically? Of course on a server, otherwise it wouldn't be reachable from the net. But who maintains those servers? Is there some contract with those who maintain it?

In my experience if you run things professionally you have to set up log rotation purely for legal reasons anyways. Is serverless without logs? Or how would you there ensure to log privacy relevant data only for the legally allowed periods?

How do you do SSL on serverless and who is in control of the certs that guarantee safe communications between you and your customers? If it is not you, are they somehow contractually bound to keep your user data private?

> In my experience if you run things professionally you have to set up log rotation purely for legal reasons anyways. Is serverless without logs? Or how would you there ensure to log privacy relevant data only for the legally allowed periods?

AFAIK the big providers use log rotation by default. I just know that I've been running some low-stakes serverless projects for years and have always been able to access recent logs, and never worried about disk space. Privacy laws is a good point I hadn't thought of (in the context of these projects), though.

> How do you do SSL on serverless

In the case of Netlify, they already manage the certificate if you point your domain at them and click a button, so it works automatically with their functions. Same story with Cloudflare. AWS and Google make you jump through a few more hoops, or you can host the endpoint from one of their domains and piggyback on their certificate.

I imagine the security practices of all four would hold up to the security practices of a 4 Euro / month VPS host.

> Instead it seems like a buzzword (?) for a weirdly niche way of running things that someone with a 4 Euro/Month nginx instance that hosts 10 websites will probably never understand.

That's exactly it. It's a way to intermittently run a piece of code in a managed environment. You're basically guaranteed that the environment is setup, and that the code will start up and execute. That is basically it.

People are extremely enamoured with it, for no apparent reason. The only usecase I've found for myself so far is running small analytics BigQuery queries to look for easily detectable anomalies once a day and send a Slack message if something's wrong. This way you avoid etting up a separate Kubernetes job etc. Makes no sense outside of GCP.

"Server" can mean many things. A few (obvious) meanings:

* A role in the client-server model. One machine makes requests and asks for info or things to be done, and the other end executes the request.

* The physical (or virtual) machine that runs the processes that fulfill the server role

* A class of "serious" machines that do important stuff somewhere not directly facing the end user (desktop or mobile device).

* A unit of administration: the thing you log in with ssh, install/update software, rotate logs, organize user accounts on, create groups, handle file permissions, craft backup scripts, cron jobs, handle disk space, and generally care about filesystem health etc etc etc

As you correctly pointed out, the "serverless" buzzword clearly talks about code that has to run on some machine, which is not your desktop or mobile device, so it's still about the client-server model and it's still running in servers, which ultimately have ti be administered by somebody somehow.

The "less" suffix in the buzzword means that that person is not you. You don't have to manage the server.

It's hard to find a better word. Sysadminless? NoPet? JustRunIt? FocusOnMyCode?

All names have their drawbacks. My main qualm with serverless is not that there are servers involved, but that it's not clear what is serverless and what it's not.

For example, is kubernetes a serverless platform? As a user if it (not an admin) you don't need to worry about any of the good old sysadmin chores, i.e. you don't manage the actual servers where your code runs.

Otoh generally when people talk about serverless they don't talk about abstractions like kubernetes but usually about going on step further in the abstaction ladder and imagine a world that's not only "serverless" but "processless", where you don't build software and deploy it somewhere but where you write some "functions" and map of them to some endpoint and the system takes care of figuring out how to build, deploy and manage the full lifecycle.