Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by solardev 968 days ago
Also, I just realized "Bref" is its own project that lets you run PHP on serverless Lambdas... like a Google Cloud Run on Amazon?

Is this really such a big niche? It's weird to me to you'd want to use PHP for something like this (and I love PHP, it just doesn't strike me as the best tool for serverless).
2 comments
mnapoli 968 days ago
PHP is great for serverless because its execution model is compatible with it.

Unlike Node, Python, Java, etc. that start a long-lived server, each request is handled by PHP in a separate process.

That's what makes it really to use with serverless (and lift-and-shift, like what Treezor did).

link
solardev 968 days ago
Does that really matter when JS can be isolated in V8?

Comparing Bref (https://bref.sh/docs#maturity-matrix) which inherits Lambda's 200ms+ cold starts vs Cloudflare's 5ms (https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-cold-starts-with-clo...), for example, is a pretty big difference.

But I guess if performance isn't a critical use (or you just have so many invocations all the time in every data center that cold start isn't an issue), it's nice to be able to ~port~ copy and paste over your existing PHP code.

link
deleugpn 968 days ago
As you can see on the website (https://bref.sh/) there's 13 billion monthly AWS Lambda invocations using Bref (PHP).
link
solardev 968 days ago
That doesn't really say much. Isn't the whole point of serverless to support high-volume, individually-inexpensive, invocations?

For context, 13B is like roughly a <strike>$2000</strike> (edit: more like $4000, sorry) spend on Cloudflare Workers, similar cost (harder to calculate but ballpark similar) on Lambda. That could be a single company spending the bulk of that.

(Further edit: Lambda pricing is way off too. See reply below.)

link
deleugpn 968 days ago
That ballpark is not even close to the park. My company spends ~$500/month on AWS Lambda and we're doing about 2M/req/day with Bref. There's still 12B 940M requests to account for
link
solardev 968 days ago
Thank you, and sorry about that!

How come Lambda is so expensive for you?

At 13000M invocations/mo, that's $2600 in requests. Is it the GB-seconds duration charge that get you?

link
deleugpn 968 days ago
The GB-second is the relevant cost of AWS Lambda. # of invocations is pretty irrelevant.

60'000'000 requests

1536MB RAM

300ms response avg

(calculation includes free tier):

Request costs: $11.80/month

Execution costs: $443.42/month

Total AWS Lambda costs: $455.22/month

link
solardev 968 days ago
I see, thank you for the explanation! Sorry for my mistaken assumptions.
link