Agreed. It only sounds maybe 1 step removed from where aws lambda’s are now. You fiddle with the code in the lambda IDE, and submit for deployment. Is this really that much different?
Lambda is the antithesis of frictionless development, most of your life is invested in figuring out the Lambda way to do things, just like App Engine before it
"I just need to run this function every 10 minutes"
.. (3 blog posts later)
.. (1 lunch break later)
.. (5 Git commits across 3 repos containing a mix of CloudFormation, CloudWatch and Terraform, 3 new IAM policies and 12 S3 buckets with completely unmemorable names)
.. 5pm, oh shit, I haven't actually written the function yet
Dark founder here. Yes, completely agree with this. To a certain extent, Dark is aimed at being what lambda/serverless should have been.
The thing that frustrates me about Lambda (and really all of AWS) is that we're just dealing with a bit of code and bit of data. Even in 1999 when I had just started coding I could write something that runs every 10 minutes. But now it's super challenging. Why is it so hard to take a request, munge it, send it somewhere, and then respond to it. That should be trivial! (and in Dark, it is)
You think what they should have been was making people use a custom unproven language and a completely different text editor? Why would anyone want to eliminate their choice in two areas that have been commoditized so well?
I hate acronyms so much :'(. To anyone reading this, please write the full term at least once before using an obscure acronym. It's a pain to decipher, creates confusion, and results in miscommunication. I have no idea what DETA is for and google doesn't help at all. My best guess is "Deployment Estimate Time of Arrival", which doesn't make any sense...
Isn't that what people in this thread are speaking against? It may abstract something away, but with the downsides of learning this new (probably leaky) abstraction, increased third-party reliance, more magic, etc.
We believe people tend to opt for the less complex solution over time. This evolution happens slowly and may upset many people but in the end, simplicity wins. Caching, SQL, Load Balancers didn't exist a few decades ago and now we spend months of our limited time trying to tame the cloud machine.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a lover of (complex) systems, but not everybody needs them/can maintain them.
"Multi-level storage system having a buffer store with variable mapping modes" (1972) mentions caching. The term doesn't require explanation in the paper so was obviously in reasonably wide use already https://patents.google.com/patent/US3820078A/en
DETA[0] is a scalable 'cloud computer' built out of a set of managed services and SDKs that removes time spent by you and your team on infra configuration, security, and maintenance.
I think they actually do much more, they go really deep, it's like your project is huge ast, deployed when saved/compiled/typechecked, it's like big, persisted ast tree; i think this is how they store things - as ast, ast deltas, there are no text files at all. I'm not even sure if you can save your sourcecode if it doesn't compile. Compiled (and "locked") code means deployed code. I don't know how they do deployment of single code as multiple instances - maybe they don't support it at all? ie. everything is stateless with context comming in as input? I don't know. Everything seems "dark" about this project (no reference, no examples, no playground, your code belongs to them, can't use git etc.). But it's interesting, will keep an eye open for this one.
This is the right approach to do this kind of stuff!
The problem with dark is that it's a language and it's 'hidden and proprietary' - unfortunately, it's too dark to know what it actually is so we can't but assume. I hope I'm wrong and it's less of a language and more of an editor.
I'm working on a similar sideproject where you define your data in a tree-like shape then generate stuff from that with events in between. Kind of AST but more of an Architecture Syntax Tree.
The advantages are exactly what you said and dark claims - compiled code is deployed code, otherwise it is just a data tree.
This enables automatic versioning, caching, generation and provides a better UX for development where your types are infered, your tests obvious, your errors are clear as a day and you basically can't fuck up.
Most times I've worked with Lambda (or other competing cloud functions) it's been difficult or infeasible to run my function locally. Which means I can now ONLY test my code manually after a minute or so of deploy time.
Separate from anything else about Dark, it appears to fundamentally avoid that problem.
With Azure Functions, the runtime[1] is open source, and the development tooling for VSCode makes it easy to run them locally [2], starting up in a few seconds. You pass in your database keys etc as environmental variables, and it integrates nicely with the IoT Hub tooling so you can debug the whole device sends message -> function gets hit flow in one window.
However, I have had this break in places before, and not really been able to figure out why from what is going on under the hood, needing to restart various parts to get it working. Checking the contents of the database is annoyingly manual, requiring a seperate GUI only tool[3] and hitting the refresh button a lot, a "watch" window would be much nicer. Profiling once deployed is also difficult, I ended up having to inject timestamps at various different places to try and measure end to end latency.
If Dark can give better tooling for debugging once deployed, it would be a definite advantage.
I've done a fair number of Azure Functions - mostly triggered from messages on storage queues and running locally under Visual Studio they mostly run fine with an occasional glitch where the function won't trigger - easy enough to stop it and run again. I don't find it a huge problem though.
"I just need to run this function every 10 minutes"
.. (3 blog posts later)
.. (1 lunch break later)
.. (5 Git commits across 3 repos containing a mix of CloudFormation, CloudWatch and Terraform, 3 new IAM policies and 12 S3 buckets with completely unmemorable names)
.. 5pm, oh shit, I haven't actually written the function yet