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Low End Serverless?
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Low End Serverless?

lentrolentro Member, Host Rep

Just curious, would you think if your fav VPS providers started offering serverless compute (like AWS Lambda)?

I'm surprised nobody is offering it.

Thanked by 2bulbasaur ferri

Comments

  • Most of the end clients are just using wp anyways and does not really know serverless.

  • Yes, I would definitely be interested. Though, I'm currently a Lambda customer and the pricing is quite good (i.e. my bill is only a few cents per month) so I'm not sure how much lowend providers could compete in this regard (compared to something like EC2, where the price difference between EC2 on-demand instances and a lowend provider are night and day).

  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate

    I'll love that, but only if the API is equivalent to one of the major clouds.
    I don't want to rebuild my app when the provider deadpools.

    Thanked by 2coreflux hannes
  • lentrolentro Member, Host Rep

    @Unixfy said: where the price difference between EC2 on-demand instances and a lowend provider are night and day

    Yeah, serverless is actually p good. Firecracker MicroVMs are v cool and eliminate all the OS bloat and unnecessary RAM from running full OSes on hundreds of VMs on a single host.

    Lambda effectively charges $160/mo for the compute power equivalent to a $2/mo VPS, but it's just because everyone uses very little that the price seems very low. It's quite ingenious, I think :)

    Thanked by 1Unixfy
  • Daniel15Daniel15 Veteran
    edited February 2021

    Honestly, I don't think there's much of a market for it. The 'big' players (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, Oracle Functions, and Cloudflare Workers) already cover it pretty well for decent pricing, so it'd be difficult to compete.

    For people that want to self-host on their own VPS, OpenFaaS and fnproject work well, and there's also Fission, OpenWhisk, Kubeless, and a few others.

    @yoursunny said: I don't want to rebuild my app when the provider deadpools.

    Yeah, provider-specific APIs are not very nice. Unfortunately I don't know of a generic FaaS API since OpenStack discontinued theirs :(. The closest thing I know of is the https://www.serverless.com/ framework which tries to smooth over the differences between different providers.

    @lentro said: Yeah, serverless is actually p good. Firecracker MicroVMs are v cool and eliminate all the OS bloat and unnecessary RAM from running full OSes on hundreds of VMs on a single host.

    Cloudflare Workers are pretty interesting in that regard. Not only do they share the underlying OS across several workers, they also share the same V8 runtime: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-workers-works#isolates. Because of that, they can fit a LOT more functions per server than other technologies, since there's very minimal overheads (rather than every function being "a separate VM" or "a separate app", it's more like "a separate tab in your web browser")

  • @Daniel15 said: Yeah, provider-specific APIs are not very nice. Unfortunately I don't know of a generic FaaS API since OpenStack discontinued theirs :(. The closest thing I know of is the https://www.serverless.com/ framework which tries to smooth over the differences between different providers.

    I'm use https://www.openfaas.com/

    Thanked by 3lentro yoursunny ferri
  • bulbasaurbulbasaur Member
    edited February 2021

    Offering a basic serverless platform is not that hard (even if you had to write the thing from scratch).

    The problem is scaling -- you have to keep a large number of servers sitting around just in case there are spikes in requests. Major players work around this through their Interruptible/Spot offerings, any capacity required during a spike can be "bought" from the pool of idle servers and released when not required, effectively ensuring that their idle capacity is efficiently utilised.

    I believe low-end providers do not have anywhere near this capacity and do not have a business model that allows for Interruptible/Spot type offerings, which means they'd have to keep idle servers just for the ocassion.

    Also, you need a database offering to go along with it, otherwise most people can't write interesting web apps. Although, I guess most providers can run a large mongo cluster and let users use the usual mongo drivers.

    With that said: I'd be very interested in an offering by a low end provider that can also scale executions to the scale of large providers.

    Thanked by 2ferri TimboJones
  • You can buy a vps and install faasd on it....
    It's really in the spirit of lowendbox

  • That's what I am trying to build here https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/167681/beta-test-and-break-my-docker-hosting-service#latest

    Its not exactly serverless yet but soon it should start behaving that way. Think of containers starting in 1-2 seconds and dynamic auto-scaling.

    The goal is an affordable serverless multi-region hosting platform backend by containers making it easy to migrate over.

    Thanked by 2Erisa ferri
  • Sorry but this has nothing to do with serverless, please go check what aws lambda is doing.

    What you are doing is more like fargate on digital ocean.

  • @lentro said:

    @Unixfy said: where the price difference between EC2 on-demand instances and a lowend provider are night and day

    Yeah, serverless is actually p good. Firecracker MicroVMs are v cool and eliminate all the OS bloat and unnecessary RAM from running full OSes on hundreds of VMs on a single host.

    Lambda effectively charges $160/mo for the compute power equivalent to a $2/mo VPS, but it's just because everyone uses very little that the price seems very low. It's quite ingenious, I think :)

    And database pricing too very expensive.

  • 160$/mo does not give you the compute of a 2$/mo vps, 2$/mo vpses as per tos usually cap around 0.1 of a cpu core.

    It's more expensive than somewhat dedicated instances, or a dedi for sure if you're using that all the time, but it saves you money when you need to run something that requires 1gb ram for a few seconds at the time, every once a while.

    Thanked by 1bulbasaur
  • @angelius said:

    Sorry but this has nothing to do with serverless, please go check what aws lambda is doing.

    What you are doing is more like fargate on digital ocean.

    I understand how Lambda works, what I meant is that my goal is to support that type of use-case eventually. E.g. connect a repo where you host your CF workers or Lambda code and we would automatically deploy it with all the bells and whistles of AWS hosted Lambda. Of course as long as its not using internal AWS events and is more of a HTTP function.

    And I agree that at the current stage its more like Fargate.

    In any case its always interesting hearing what people are looking for :) If anyone with serverless experience wants to help build a good alternative PM me your feedback and ideas!

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran
    edited February 2021

    I've no idea about the "serverless" hype, but I guess on the lowend-land servers are so cheap and everyone has ton idling anyways, we have no need to invent how to be serverless. :)

    Thanked by 1hannes
  • @rm_ said:
    I've no idea about the "serverless" hype, but I guess on the lowend-land servers are so cheap and everyone has ton idling anyways, we have no need to invent how to be serverless. :)

    ikr, i feel like getting scammed if i dont own the servers lol.

  • angeliusangelius Member
    edited February 2021

    Frankly, it make no sense to compete with AWS/Azure/GCP on serverless side because the main goal of serverless is scaling and THEY have millions of servers in their serverless pools, also they are super cheap or even FREE for low usage... and for high usage no one can really compete with them on the scaling part.

    If you don't need scaling and don't want to deal with big cloud players, you can use Faasd / Fission on a vm

  • Scaleway has been offering serverless for a long time, and is currently free to use since it's still beta.

    I suspect their price will match cloudflare paid workers, which is a billion times cheaper than aws/gcp/azure.

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