[Serverless/AWS Lambda] Back to the side hustle! And I need some help 🤗
For the past couple of months, I have been iterating over a few ideas that were problem statements in my development workflow. And one of the most teasing ones is: hosting + deploying things and keep them running. Everyone who has built a web service might have known the pain of running servers that are scarcely used half of the time, but you have to keep them running. When I came across Serverless, I thought of it as a silver bullet for all my problems.
Serverless makes you pay for the compute and storage that you use and not per hour. Platforms like AWS give you a million API calls free every month, which technically means that your web server bill would be almost zero in the early stages of your company. And I saw an opportunity to improve the workflow for the community. I have a working POC that would help you get started quickly on AWS Lambda to reduce your infrastructure cost.
Here are a few articles depicting the cost savings you can achieve using serverless:
- https://techbeacon.com/enterprise-it/economics-serverless-computing-real-world-test
- https://y-sbm.com/blog/are-serverless-reduce-your-costs
- https://medium.com/serverless-transformation/is-serverless-cheaper-for-your-use-case-find-out-with-this-calculator-2f8a52fc6a68
Here are the things that I need your help with 🙏
- Would you like to use my POC to improve your AWS Lambda development experience? If yes, you can comment on this post or send an email to [email protected].
- If you are already using serverless but are facing some problems, I would love to help you out. If you need any help, please comment or send an email 🙇♂️
- If you are not using serverless and do not intend to, I would love to know why?
Thanks a ton 🚀
So I like to build new projects based on Cloudflare workers, which is another 10x cheaper (and faster) than any of the big providers, but also more limiting (maximum 50ms compute time per call, it's not a Node environment).
I think we all need to accept the following: it probably doesn't matter. 99% of an Indie Hacker's projects will fail or succeed not because they could save $10 or $100 per month on a 24/7 server instance running on DigitalOcean. They will succeed or fail because they can find customers for their product. Trying to minimize these small costs won't help and probably just cost more time. Build your service with the stack you know, if that's a PHP script on a 24/7 server that's probably fine!
Some use-cases absolutely require the instant scaling + reliability + latency (if you run it on the edge) benefits that serverless can provide. An example of such a service is the Captcha product I am a co-founder of: from one moment to the next we may see 1 million requests and it's hard to scale servers at that speed.
Another reason you may want to use a serverless stack is for learning or for fun, and that's a valid reason too!
This makes complete sense actually. This was the only hunch I had, is it really worth saving these dollars? This is a good perspective @Guido :).
I agree completely. I think I saw another post on Quora regarding Firebase (and potentially high costs) that said something to the effect of, by the time Firebase costs become a problem, it's actually not because it means your startup is succeeding in some fashion.
Started loving the idea of static pages + services
There are places you can host static stuff free like GitHub and gitlab
Good for blogs
Also for webapps as static with firebase doing auth,db,files...
You can also do serverless functions from there even some pre made or hook up integrations with zappier for example
It's kinda part the same just more wrapped
All depends what your doing I guess
For me it's kinda part of learning to be a frontend/app developer a bit, the other side of the tech divide after doing DevOps - no ops 😶
Hey Akshay, can you help debug errors in serverless applications faster than traditional methods?
I actually pivoted to https://getapistack.com . But I can help you to debug any errors you are facing :)
Hey @akshaydeo, I wrote an article recently about alternatives to AWS, GCP and Azure with platfors that let you deploy your app without running your own servers - these alternatives are cheaper and easier to use. Hope it will help you.
https://alenakorpula.medium.com/3-best-aws-azure-and-gcp-alternatives-1ca94eacb8b7
I don't quite understand what your POC is - a SaaS? CLI? Consulting time?
If I can share about myself, I am a relatively new developer (~2 years total, less than 1 year on web, less than 6 months on serverless). This week I found myself in serverless "devops" hell, finding out my stackdriver logging costs were adding up, Cloud Build / storage costs accruing from GCF deployments, then I deleted the container bucket and was getting a build error when I tried to update a function, etc.
All that said, as a solo developer (and given my personal style) I like to try and fully understand all of the details and guts of every aspect of my own app, including the serverless details. So even though this week was painful, I consider it all learning and am hesitant to have an intermediary layer between me and GCP.
Hi @policenauts, the current POC I have is similar to https://serverless.com, which helps you easily configure your cloud functions on GCP. But I aim to build a complete IDE (based on VSCode) to help you organize, monitor (cost, performance, usage) of your functions.
This will allow you to
Currently, managing functions is a bit of a challenge. As you have mentioned, you need to configure a lot of moving parts that could be automated. This tool won't be a middle layer but a facilitator to manage, build and deploy your functions.
Would you use something like this?
@akshaydeo sorry for the delayed response. These all sound like good features but I am probably not the right target audience as I am still just learning the basics of serverless and, other than keeping them hot, I believe I can do everything else for the most part through a combination of gcloud command line and Google Cloud Console UI (sometimes painful, yes).
Also, from what I can tell it looks like serverless.com is for deploying a whole app for serverless - for me, I am more JAMstack so I just use serverless functions as discrete REST endpoints essentially.
No worries. Thank you so much for this feedback. I will be going back to the drawing board with this feedback and hopefully will develop something helpful for the developer community. 🙇♂️