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Comment by kiwicopple | Hacker News Reader

I guess the term “Serverless” is pretty ambiguous, but since this originated from AWS Lambda (firecracker) and that’s the same primitive as Fly.io then it seemed fitting. You can scale up/down compute and snapshot memory for fast startups

The other tricky thing is data: there are several ways to handle this. Since Tigris has a lot of the data replication features that Postgres would traditionally handle then it looks promising. That said - it comes with tradeoffs that you point out (transfer costs) but these are also costs that you’d pay for postgres replication. I’ll try benchmark some of these costs and compare them across several implementations. At this stage I just wanted to get an MVP working: the harder stuff is still ahead

Thanks for your comment - a lot of good points

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> these are also costs that you’d pay for postgres replication.

Some places define a 2nd (private) network interface for their VMs, and you can transfer data between your VMs over that private interface without cost.

Not sure if AWS does it that way though.

> I guess the term “Serverless” is pretty ambiguous, (...)

I don't this is the case though.

The core principle of serverless computing is that a cloud provider supplies a managed service and scales computational resources allocated to the service to meet it's computational needs.

This "serverless postgres" meets none of the items in the definition.

You mentioned AWS Lambdas. AWS allocates all computational resources when a function is invoked.

Let's face it: this was an attempt to abuse a buzzword.

I think you're being unduly harsh.

The term "serverless" is broad enough that it's use here is fine.

Fly machines allocate all the computation resources when a TCP connection is established. I feel like this is the same?

considering that this is an experimental hack, I don't think it's reasonable to get this hung up on semantics or to throw accusations. especially over a term as close to meaningless as this.

it scales to zero and manages its own computer resources, that's a lot closer than a lot of "serverless" products ever get

I use Fly.io, it’s not serverless at all, it’s a PaaS that manages your servers for you via its own automations and cli. Fly also already supports postgres (I use this too) so I’m not sure why I would use this? To me the whole point of Fly is minimal work :)

When you say it like that, nothing really is serverless. Everything is running on some computer.

Serverless architectures are provided by servers.

Serverless is like AWS lambda, when you don’t have an explicitly running VM that you pay per time; instead your code is run in “a cloud” and you pay per invocation.

This is nothing new! “Serverless” is well defined and understood for years and years!

This is actually what Fly machines do under the covers. When you use it as a PaaS, the client CLI sets all this up for you, and then our proxy starts/stops things as needed.

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