[agentultra]

It’s also great for vendor lock in and rent extraction. At least in its current iterations. I’m fairly certain Amazon isn’t going to make it easy to run your “serverless” applications on anything but their infrastructure.

What would be more interesting would be languages and runtimes that run on the next network that is distributed, peer-to-peer, and able to be trusted. And easier to program for than they are today in their current iteration.

Edit: which is where I thought the BOOM group was going back in 2012 or so.

[meekins]

The interface between Lambda and your business logic is usually very thin so in case of simple REST APIs migrating from platform (as long as the target platform has a compatible language runtime) to another or to be executed in a web app framework is rather easy.

Serverless applications' reliance on other proprietary services like Cognito, DynamoDB etc is another thing however...

[moduspol]

> Serverless applications' reliance on other proprietary services like Cognito, DynamoDB etc is another thing however...

I feel like even this lock-in is overstated. Those other services are billed based on usage and are completely separate from each other. Your migration path away would be one service at a time.

That's in no way comparable to traditional lock-in, which is like a decades-old Oracle database with high licensing fees paid annually and depended upon by dozens of complex business processes interacting directly and indirectly with each other. You don't really have a migration path in that case because there's not enough time / resources to decouple everything and migrate to something else, so you're stuck.

And that doesn't touch on the reality that if you're not relying on AWS for Lambda, DynamoDB, Kinesis, etc., then you're maintaining something yourself, which itself is not free from lock-in. Building a system that heavily utilizes Cassandra or Kafka may not have an annual licensing cost, but absolutely imposes a cost in terms of maintenance, team expertise, and (of course) makes moving away from them look not much different than moving from DynamoDB or Kinesis.

[tsimionescu]

The problem is also that Lambda works really poorly with anything that is NOT Cognito and DynamoDB. For example, we were using some CouchBase we deployed ourselves - however, that meant that the Lambda now had a network interface in a private subnet, and start times skyrocketed, especially for concurrent access. When we also started doing our own authentication with yet another Lambda, request times for cold lambdas (which also means every new concurrent connection, remember) almost doubled.

There's also the fact that most of the code isn't really gone, it's just transformed from web server logic to lambda deployment/configuration logic.

The biggest win all told seems to be security - at least with Lambda you don't need to worry about staying on top of OS updates and the likes. I'm not at all convinced that we gained much of anything else.

Oh, and one thing that's rarely discussed is how much development&qa costs skyrocket when you have a larger team developing a fully serverless application, each with their own setup and running a few performance tests every few months...

[scarface74]

We use lambdas all of the time with ElasticSearch, Aurora (Mysql), etc.

[wahnfrieden]

AWS is solving cold start times for VPC Lambda, they announced it at re:invent.

[scarface74]

Cognito is just a standard authorization service that supports Oath 2.0, SAML 2.0, and OpenID Connect.

It is a drop in replacement for dozens of other authentication providers.

[mitjam]

Migrating away from Cognito is hard and involves end user participation as you can not export password hashes.

[scarface74]

It’s just the opposite of migrating users to Cognito.

If you are storing the passwords in Cognito and not using federated login, you should be able to insert a lambda trigger that captures the user’s password then authenticates the user with Cognito via code. Once the user is authenticated, store the password in your new store.

Yes that would be a slow process but it isn’t like you couldn’t move everything else off of AWS first and let that be a slow migration over time.

[Cthulhu_]

How is a .js file with a basic implementation of

  exports.handler = (event) => ({
    statusCode: 200,
    body: "Hello world: " + event.body
  })

vendor lock-in? You can hang this in an Express server yourself at any time. You can spin up your own three billion nodeJS servers yourself with this. The only thing Amazon does is hardware / instance management, load balancing and of course billing, which I don't see as vendor lock-in.

[xrd]

But, the thing is so much code is removed in serverless. I'm not saying cloud providers aren't fighting to lock you in. It is just so much easier to switch if you have 1% of the code you used to.

[tonyarkles]

I’m asking this from a place of genuine curiosity. Since the whole serverless thing has been gaining momentum, I’ve been mostly working on embedded stuff and haven’t been back to see what the new hotness is over in web land.

What code gets eliminated in serverless? I have historically done most of my http backends using things like Flask or Sinatra or Elixir or Go (with net/http), and I’ve never felt like there’s a whole lot of code to begin with. What am I missing (if you don’t mind elaborating)?

[xrd]

I'm thinking of Firebase. For example, with Firebase, my web clients (web or Android, for example) don't ever talk to my backend directly. I have a serverless firebase function that accepts a trigger when there is an update to the firestore (cloud database) or storage (like AWS S3). I get a JSON object (which is declarative) that I can use to send the file or data on to a new process. This decoupling makes my firebase function really small: it only parses JSON and sends an event, perhaps to another Google service.

Compare this to a large application where you are marshalling objects from the HTTP POST request into temp objects inside your application language. Making that work with all clients, within all server contexts, is a lot of code which I hated to write.

With serverless, I'm never connecting my clients or backends directly. I'm thinking in terms of moving high level objects (JSON, files, events) between systems, and Google provides the glue to wire those together. It takes a mind shift, but when you realize how much glue code you are writing and that you can forget, it makes your application layer really simple.

[biztos]

I've only done a little bit of this stuff, but so far my impression is your code will get more complicated in AWS if you glue in Flask/Sinatra/etc. for the API Gateway, but can still get a lot less complicated if you "think serverless" and run fairly tight functions in AWS Lambda. The system then takes care of auth, request parsing, response formatting, and most of the other stuff you'd do in Flask, plus of course it eliminates the actual web-server layer.

The downside is that you then need to call them via Lambda instead of using some kind of REST API -- however at least in my case, this turns out to be the much lesser evil as I'm only using them internally, and have my own code that makes the calls. My "lock in" is that I would have to change that code, but it's trivial.

[meekins]

API Gateway becomes your HTTP server, your routing layer defined in Flask/Sinatra/Express & co is implemented in API GW integration configuration and handling routed requests is implemented as Lambdas that process events from API GW.

[mozey]

With AWS Lambda I try to avoid using API Gateway as it seems to me that is exactly where the lock-in occurs. Instead I have one catch-all route on API GW and I keep my routing layer in the app. This also makes it easier to run the app on dev without recreating the entire AWS environment

[scarface74]

If you work for any size corporation, they aren’t going to just switch their infrastructure because a developer said that they pinky promise the migration will be easy.

You’re always for all practical purposes locked into your infrastructure once your business grows.

[meekins]

You can absolutely do that. Then you just need to do more custom work to enable route level observability and metrics.

[scarface74]

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express

With no code changes, you can deploy a standard Node/Express app as either a lambda service or a standard Express app.

There are a frameworks like this from AWS for all supported languages. It’s well documented how to use the API Gateway lambda proxy feature.

For non API lambdas. The only thing you have to do is add an entry point method that takes has two arguments - a JSON event object and a lambda context.

I have another app that can be deployed as a Windows .Net Core service or lambda based on the CI/CD pipeline.

[zulrah]

Have you seen Kelsey's Hightower demo where he used s3 event as a trigger for Google Cloud Function? You can already use serverless providers that abstract your function from the provider, but of course in that case you're locked to that specific vendor.

Also, no licence stops you from migrating from Lambda at any moment. Other Companies have you to pay enormous licencing fees and lock you for a one year contract or even longer.

[silverlake]

It's in the paper as the second fallacy. They recommend something like a POSIX standard for Backend-as-a-Service components.