[llogiq]

Author here. This was a fun exercise to produce a semantic search using only free-tier services (which in the case of Cohere means non-commercial use only and in the case of AWS Lambda is limited to one year).

It also marks my first foray into using cloud services for a project. I've long been a cloud sceptic, and doing this confirmed some of my suspicions regarding complexity (mostly the administrative part around roles and URLs), while the coding part itself was a blast.

[Roark66]

Cool, but I suggest to look into using terraform for "infrastructure as code" for creating all sorts of aws services/infrastructure and maintaining state.

It seems complex at first, but it is a lot more maintable and portable than creating aws infrastructure manually in the console. Once you leave your service to run for 6 months you will forget where stuff is, then in the worst possible moment if it goes down and you need to make some change you'll be franticly looking for aws docs... "can I create a synthetic canary and use the lambda I already have, or do I have to delete it and create it from Cloud Watch interface?" These kind of questions are the bane of Aws ops experience... And once you learn everything they "bring a new console experience"... So I prefer to learn terraform once and that's it.

Why terraform and not python with boto, cdk, cloudformation or ansible or something else? Because terraform is easy to port between providers (sort of), people who are not that good in python find terraform easier so you don't need "senior" people to maintain your code, finally it's a pretty "opinionated" about how w stuff should be done, so it's unlikely you'll open your project in a year and think "why in the world I did that!?", because all your tf projects will be very similar most likely. Also tf is mainly for infrastructure as code, there is no configuration management like in ansible... It is for one thing and it does it relatively well. (I have no relation to TF beyond being a happy user).

[llogiq]

Thank you for the suggestion! I actually thought about using terraform, but I wanted to keep the experiment somewhat minimal regarding technologies and as I had already added AWS Lambda and Rust to the tech stack, I wanted to stay as close to the metal as possible. Besides, this is not for commercial applications, so I don't think high availability is in scope.

[rcme]

I find serverless to be needlessly complex. I'd rather write an HTTP server and serve it off of t3.micro instance (also free-tier eligible). So much simpler for side projects.

[foobarbecue]

I find "serverless" is indeed more complex, because it's a higher abstraction layer. Often, I see people deploying containers lambdas or pods that are full unix environments, with permissions, network routing, filesystems etc. And then because it's "serverless" they use permissions (IAM), networking stuff (VPC, etc), filesystems (S3 etc), and other capabilities that they already have in a lower abstraction level (unix) and are sort of also using. So the complexity of a unix server is a unix server, but the complexity of "serverless" is a unix server plus all the capabilities you duplicated at a higher abstraction level.

Many other commenters replying to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36693471 are interpreting "complex" as "hard for me to set up." I think that's neither here nor there -- no matter what's underneath, you can always rig something to deploy it with the press of a button. The question is: how many layers of stuff did you just deploy? How big of a can of worms did you just dump on future maintainers?

[brigadier132]

Serverless is too broad a category to say things like "it's too complex". For example, if you already know docker, you can use google cloud run and just deploy the container to it. You then just say "I want to allow this many simultaneous connections, a minimum of N instances, a maximum of M instances, and each instance should have X vcpus and Y gb of ram".

[llogiq]

When starting this project I thought the same thing, but having done it I honestly cannot tell that much of a difference. Yes, there are two more steps in setting up the Lambda function, but in the end you still write an HTTP server and have them serve it.

[tobilg]

Using a decent IaC framework such as Serverless Framework or the CDK instead of the AWS CLI would make the deployment pretty easy.

[llogiq]

I also found while writing the article but after I had already done my research that cargo-lambda has grown some additional functionality that could have removed the need for the AWS CLI, but I wanted to get the article out, so I didn't test-drive that.

[rcme]

When using an EC2 instance, testing, deployment, and adding new endpoints are all simpler.

[rajamaka]

Easier for you* I've done both for years now and I find developing, deploying, testing lambdas much simpler.

[zeroCalories]

I agree on testing and dev, but for deployment I think stuff like elastic beanstalk or app engine strike a good balance. Almost never run pure EC2.

[joshstrange]

“Serverless” often has some upfront complexity but I greatly prefer it because once I have it running I’ve never had scaling issues or even had to think about them. To each their own and I’m sure that serverless isn’t the answer for everyone but for my projects (which are very bursty, with long periods of inactivity) is a dream.

[kacperlukawski]

It's a bit easier in Python if you use tools like https://www.serverless.com/. I'm not sure if Rust has something similar yet.

[ZeroCool2u]

At the cost of being very specific to Rust, Shuttle is pretty damn simple. https://www.shuttle.rs/

[bongobingo1]

It's kind of unclear to me, can I use shuttle without using shuttle.rs (the platform) to actually run it?

Not that I am against paying for a service, but the idea of writing my app against with a specific library against a specific platform makes me uneasy.

They have a github project but I think that is just the CLI + rust libs?

[ZeroCool2u]

From what I've read you can, but I haven't tried myself or looked into it too deeply.

[pgt]

First login failed with: "Callback handler failed. CAUSE: Missing state cookie from login request (check login URL, callback URL and cookie config)." but after retrying it went to Projects list. API Key copy button doesn't do anything.

[numpad0]

Yeah it seems the premise of serverless is your code always restarts, which is exactly the same as cloud. The only difference is in front of trillion explosive gotchas in the giant 200GB free middleware called GNU/Linux are their employment in case with the serverless vs yours with the cloud.

UNIX is close to turning 50, and people are fundamentally paying as well as getting paid to make a written program loop to the beginning, instead of exiting. I think this is kind of wrong.

[cddotdotslash]

It depends what you’re doing. I’ve run many side projects off a single Lambda function with the “public URL” config enabled. I pay $0 because of the free tier and updating the code is as simple as pushing a ZIP file. No SSH, no OS updates, nothing else to worry about. You start to get into trouble when you try to break your app into tons of microservices without using some kind of framework or deployment tooling to keep it straight.

[cebert]

What about serverless do you find to be “needlessly complex”?

[rcme]

There are just too many required parameters to create a single handler. And then you need to do that N times for each handler. Take a look at a complete Terraform example for a lambda: https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-lambd...

For a personal project it's just a bit much in my experience, especially since most personal projects can easily be served by a t3.micro.

[cebert]

Thanks for clarifying. That’s a fair critique.

[intelVISA]

to be fair it is (mostly) a Rube Goldberg machine designed to keep backend engineers employed.

[foobarbecue]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36694373