I think of Lambda like I think of database triggers. It's a great solution for the specific thing that it's built for but people have a tendency to go very overboard with it.
Built for: Triggering events when something happens within AWS
Not built for: Replacing all of your servers
I once knew a guy who was very into Oracle and wanted to server up HTML from stored procedures. This strikes me as that line of thinking.
Serving up HTML from Stored Procedures was a thing back in the late 90's/early 2000's as enterprise vendors made the shift to web apps.
In fact quite a popular thing for client-server app's where the server was built in PL/SQL, and some clients just needed reports.
I agree, AWS Lambda is a hammer. Just like everyone in enterprise software jumped at J2EE and Enterprise Java Beans back in early 2000's, and "did it wrong", I expect the same to happen here.
I just wish I know of a decent Open Source project doing similar things in a super-light-weight fashion - ideally in Python.
Well, if you look at Lambda as a simple event notification system that integrates with AWS your closest equivalent is PHP.
PHP isn't integrated with the AWS stack, but you could drop a terabyte of code on a 256mb VM and it would all run when called. Scales down really well, which is great for housing little one off scripts to receive web hooks at minimum cost, utility servers, etc. It's not sexy, but very effective.
I'd imagine you could do the same type of thing with Python in a CGI mode or something along those lines, but most other languages purposed for web stuff tend to need to load a lot of libraries at runtime to operate that way.
Comments
I think of Lambda like I think of database triggers. It's a great solution for the specific thing that it's built for but people have a tendency to go very overboard with it.
Built for: Triggering events when something happens within AWS Not built for: Replacing all of your servers
I once knew a guy who was very into Oracle and wanted to server up HTML from stored procedures. This strikes me as that line of thinking.
Serving up HTML from Stored Procedures was a thing back in the late 90's/early 2000's as enterprise vendors made the shift to web apps.
In fact quite a popular thing for client-server app's where the server was built in PL/SQL, and some clients just needed reports.
I agree, AWS Lambda is a hammer. Just like everyone in enterprise software jumped at J2EE and Enterprise Java Beans back in early 2000's, and "did it wrong", I expect the same to happen here.
I just wish I know of a decent Open Source project doing similar things in a super-light-weight fashion - ideally in Python.
Well, if you look at Lambda as a simple event notification system that integrates with AWS your closest equivalent is PHP.
PHP isn't integrated with the AWS stack, but you could drop a terabyte of code on a 256mb VM and it would all run when called. Scales down really well, which is great for housing little one off scripts to receive web hooks at minimum cost, utility servers, etc. It's not sexy, but very effective.
I'd imagine you could do the same type of thing with Python in a CGI mode or something along those lines, but most other languages purposed for web stuff tend to need to load a lot of libraries at runtime to operate that way.