Show HN: UDP and Serverless
proxylity.com
I'm Lee, the founder and developer of Proxylity.
I became interested in UDP as a part of exploring game development, experimenting with IoT/embedded, and running global RADIUS authentication systems. I even wrote a specialized load balancer for it[1].
One of my takeaways is how little innovation has happened in UDP-based backend software. It's been the same pattern for decades: old code for stateful processes running on clusters, VMs or containers. Familiar, but expensive (time and/or money) and restrictive.
Meanwhile, while the HTTP world has benefited from eliminating most barriers to experimentation: setting up a new HTTP API or site has little to no initial cost, and usage-based cost once running. As a result we have "the web" as we know it today -- full of experimentation and creativity. I'd like to see the same happen for network services in general, and ride the wave created by giants[2][3].
UDP is stateless and serverless is stateless, which seems like a match that works. So I built UDP Gateway as the "shared hosting/serverless" way to get into UDP backends at low/no cost:
An AWS account is required -- sorry about that, but I know AWS very well so it's where I've started. The subscription in AWS marketplace costs nothing, and includes a free tier.
This is a simple service (it only delivers packets, it doesn't implement protocols) but has global scale (currently in three regions, three AZs each). The primary DX is infrastructure as code. I've published some simple examples using CloudFormation on GitHub:
https://github.com/proxylity/examples
So give it a try and let me know what you think! What do you see as the biggest blockers keeping UDP services stuck in the past? Are they?
Thanks! Lee
[1] https://github.com/mlhpdx/SimplestLoadBalancer [2] QUIC is based on UDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC [3] UDP in Chrome with Direct Sockets. https://chromestatus.com/feature/6398297361088512