Ask HN: Serverless Functions Without the AWS/Azure/GOOG Complexity?

6 points·blinotz··8 comments

Is there a serverless offering that’s focused on simplicity?

The mind numbing complexity of serverless from the big vendors isn’t worth the effort for building simple database driven websites.

Anyone know of anything?

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There are services like Netlify [1] and Zeit.co [2] but both are more expensive.

Simplicity comes at a price.

[1] https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/

[2] https://zeit.co/docs/v2/serverless-functions/introduction

What makes something like AWS lambda complex? I feel lambda is one of the easiest and fastest way to get something out the door.

I'm involved with OPS/Nanos which deploy applications as unikernels to AWS && Google Cloud. The deploy and management of them have a very serverless like feel as you can't ssh into them nor can you install random crap on them once they are deployed:

I even called them "Stateful Serverless" in a recent article:

https://dev.to/eyberg/stateful-serverless-with-unikernels-4m...

A few cool things versus something like lambda are that they are very much cloud agnostic and they are stateful by default (although very easy to run them as transient workloads as well).

If you want to check it out - open source/free at:

https://ops.city

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

https://serverless.com/ is a layer of abstraction on top of the big providers

This is the way to go. Follow the guide at https://serverless-stack.com/ and you should be golden.

I’m an awful programmer and even I found serverless stack to be surprisingly easy to follow and understand.

Cloud Run? Pretty simple. Just a Dockerfile and you are good to go.

You mean Knative (https://github.com/knative) ? ;-)

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