News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES. Parent comment

Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by scarface74 on Saturday January 04, 2020 @08:53AM (#21954889)
cgi-bin didn’t have any type of process isolation.

Also, it didn’t tie in to other none web based events.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by tyingq on Saturday January 04, 2020 @10:38AM (#21955404)
>cgi-bin didn’t have any type of process isolation

"Lambdas" don't by nature either. I can run cgi-bin in a FirecrackerVM-like ecosystem with one script per VM.

>Also, it didn’t tie in to other none web based events.

Webhooks aren't new.

I'm not disputing the popularity and convenience of serverless. I'm just noting it's somewhat like Docker. Packaging existing tech in an easier-to-use bundle.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by scarface74 on Saturday January 04, 2020 @11:01AM (#21955573)
Lambdas by nature do exactly that. AWS’s runtime launches the “VMs” in response to an event.

And with webhooks I’m required to keep enough server capacity running all of the time to handle the events. Can a web hook automatically instantiate enough VMs on demand without reducing throughput?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by tyingq on Saturday January 04, 2020 @11:25AM (#21955718)
"Can a web hook automatically instantiate enough VMs on demand without reducing throughput?"

Yes, there are various cgi-bin implementations with horizontal auto-scaling.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by scarface74 on Saturday January 04, 2020 @11:26AM (#21955721)
Across multiple servers or do you still have to provision your server to handle peak load?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by tyingq on Saturday January 04, 2020 @01:12PM (#21956359)
Yes, you can do that the same way Amazon does it. Like I said, Amazon packaged existing tech in an easy to use way.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by scarface74 on Saturday January 04, 2020 @01:17PM (#21956387)
That still begs the question, why am I as a developer wasting time fiddling with infrastructure that I could just throw a little money and a yaml file at AWS and let them do it? How am I adding a business value that will make my company money doing grunt work?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by tyingq on Saturday January 04, 2020 @04:31PM (#21957725)
I was explaining why I consider it to be "managed cgi-bin".
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by scarface74 on Saturday January 04, 2020 @11:35AM (#21955779)
How much “easier” of a bundle is a Zip file? But there is also Serverless Docker - Fargate.

And you still have to provision and pay for the VM for peak load.

Lambdas do have process isolation.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by fulafel on Saturday January 04, 2020 @01:15PM (#21956379)
cgi-bin had pretty strong process isolation for the day (Unix user account and process boundaries/limits/quotas). Enough to have remarkably robust multitenant setups on single servers.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES by scarface74 on Saturday January 04, 2020 @03:16PM (#21957163)
Unless you were on the other side running Windows IIS as a multi tenant server....
[ Parent | on HN ]