Releasing Serverless Framework V.1, and Fundraising

https://serverless.com/blog/releasing-serverless-framework-v1-and-fundraising/

by matlock • 10 years ago

169 55 10 years ago

This is definitely a step forward for software development. I'm interested to see what people build with it.

matlock9• 10 years ago

Thanks Miguel. We're going to release more about our plans for the next steps in the Framework soon. I'm currently writing those and will share with the community in the very near future (CTO of Serverless here)

ohstopitu• 10 years ago

Hi, I have been using sls since 0.5.6 and I love using it. It's a pleasure to work with, and the community on Gitter is generally eager to help.

That said, 1) What's the schedule on the documentation for best practices for SLS in production?

2) What's an example workflow ? (something involving multiple devs, testing, CI etc.)

3) And lastly, What's the timeline on adding support to Google Cloud Functions (in alpha) and Azure Functions?

bjacobel3• 10 years ago

Are there other examples of an open-source community project taking on several million dollars in venture capital funding? It seems a bit odd to me.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable using a presumably open-source, free (beer and speech) tool knowing that the group behind it will have to find a way to monetize their users in order to justify the investment from VCs at some point down the road. Open-source developers should of course be able to be compensated for their work, and the project has to find a way to sustain itself (I work for a company whose main product is open-source so I know this better than most), but the venture capital model doesn't seem like a good fit with the interests of the community, in my opinion.

That said, Serverless is a great tool, and congrats on the 1.0. Thanks to the team for their hard work.

ac360• 10 years ago

Lots. Docker, HashiCorp... It's the go-to-market strategy for lots of products now, especially developer tools.

joeblau• 10 years ago

Yeah, it seems like the strategy from the VC perspective it to eventually get the team acquihired by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Facebook.

matlock9• 10 years ago

Thanks, appreciate the shoutout!

There certainly are other open source tools like ansible, Chef, Puppet, Hashicorp, MongoDB (and many more) that have started out as an Open Source project and are still OSS champions.

We have many plans for monetisation and are working closely with small to enterprise scale companies on building products and services around the Framework that help you once your infrastructure has reached a large scale. More info to come in the future.

bjacobel3• 10 years ago

To expand on my last point, how are you balancing the needs of an open-source community (steady, stable feature development, good communication/outreach/support, dedication to supporting existing products) with the needs imposed on Serverless by the VC funding model (acquiring new users quickly, launching new products you can monetize, getting hockey stick growth)?

SEJeff• 10 years ago

hashicorp is a company started my Mitchel Hashimoto. There is no open source tool named hashicorp. Do you perhaps mean vagrant?

emdowling• 10 years ago

Realm, most recently featured on HN here[0], is a good example of this. Open source, widely adopted base product, with optional consultancy and now a full-featured platform for enterprises that need/want it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12589426

gjolund• 10 years ago

Meteor and Docker come to mind.

erichocean• 10 years ago

Are there other examples of an open-source community project taking on several million dollars in venture capital funding?

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/30/cockroachdb-just-raised-20...

marknadal• 10 years ago

I raised almost half a million for an Open Source Firebase ( https://github.com/amark/gun ).

The license is MIT which guarantees we can't coerce you to do anything.

What alternative for compensation do you propose?

bjacobel3• 10 years ago

There's a few models I've seen work well:

- Kickstarting: Django REST Framework's development was successfully funded for a year or more by funds raised on Kickstarter[1]. This model doesn't scale that well.

- Sponsorship: DRF is also a good example of this. Corporate sponsors who use the product are asked to chip in as sponsors, in return they get some branding placement and community goodwill. It seems Serverless was at one point using this model (sponsored by Coca-Cola), it's unclear why they had to stop.

- Services/support model: as popularized by Red Hat, Canonical, etc. Give away the product for free, make money on support contracts.

[1] http://www.django-rest-framework.org/topics/kickstarter-anno...

musha68k• 10 years ago

Great project - best of luck to team Serverless!

dolzenko2• 10 years ago

So it Serverless Framework that seems to be considerably tied to AWS servers.

EDIT. Only writing this because its in fact possible to imagine serverLESS framework these days (web workers, p2p etc), but this seems to be just about more volatile servers.

mxuribe2• 10 years ago

A small point, but they look to at least consider other non-AWS providers (e.g. Azure) per their note here: https://serverless.com/framework/docs/guide/installing-serve...

dfederschmidt• 10 years ago

There are pull-requests open which enable the framework to be used with Azure or IBM BlueMix OpenWhisk

cphoover2• 10 years ago

Hmm if I recall they had logos of azure, ibm whisk, and google cloud fns in their project. Seems those logos have recently been removed. Is this indicative of the future of this project, leaning towards AWS lock-in?

brudgers• 10 years ago

'Serverless' as currently jargoned is used to connote that the developer does not have to think about servers (or VM's or containers) directly. The 'serverless' buzzword does not mean that there are not servers somewhere doing useful work.

matlock9• 10 years ago

Exactly, added a small piece of text to the README about this today: https://github.com/serverless/serverless/#why-serverless

dolzenko2• 10 years ago

Sorry, can you elaborate in which way this is "does not have to think about servers"? Because almost the first thing on their tutorial is some messing around with AWS.

mxuribe2• 10 years ago

Best of luck!

benrockwood• 10 years ago

I recently started using APEX. It doesn't rely on CloudFormation and has supports for hacking Golang support. Its worth a look if your getting more serious about Lambda development and interested in other options. http://apex.run/

swordbeta• 10 years ago

Does it use API gateway?

andrewguenther• 10 years ago

Why is using CloudFormation a bad thing?

cphoover2• 10 years ago

I really love the new development being done to simplify cloud deployments of stateless horizontally scalable services.

Once Serverless supports other λaas offerings I think this will really take off.

In addition to the big boys (Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft), I'd love to see some alternative stable open source providers come about. Maybe something built on top of kubernetes or docker swarm.

matlock9• 10 years ago

We're actually talking to everyone you mentioned. I'd love to see some "on-premise" Serverless infrastructure as well, the biggest issue with that is still the event system as a Serverless infrastructure really mostly makes sense if you can do things like "when you upload something to this bucket run this function". This is hard to replicate in an on-premise system.

alexatkeplar• 10 years ago

I don't get what's so difficult to do on-prem. Your target market on-prem all use Kafka as their event bus and either Mesos or Kubernetes as their execution fabric - what's so tricky about fitting into that?

southpolesteve2• 10 years ago

Congrats on the raise, but I'll be honest it really rubs me the wrong way that they renamed to "Serverless Framework" from JAWS. They should have picked a different name. The word "Serverless", for better or worse, was what the community settled on. Lot of companies and individuals use it in many different ways and have before this project existed. But they are trying to own it[1]. Not being a good community member IMO.

Edit: An example of the kind of thing I am concerned will happen[2]. Use the word "serverless" in a project? Get a take down notice.

[1]http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4802:t7t...

[2]https://twitter.com/sindresorhus/status/776142274564616192

nanch• 10 years ago

Since TESS (Trademark Electronic Search System) requires a session, here is your reference [1] in image format. It's a trademark for SERVERLESS and also SERVERLESS FRAMEWORK both filed on November 25, 2015.

https://piqd.com/serverless_tm.png

https://piqd.com/serverless_framework_tm.png

southpolesteve2• 10 years ago

Thanks!

ilostmykeys• 10 years ago

Asshole Framework.

dfabulich• 10 years ago

I loathe that sort of thing, but in this case I think we lucked out, because "serverless" is a particularly bad name for that style of architecture.

Take this as an opportunity to call it "cloud functions" or "functions as a service" or something more accurate/descriptive.

tveita• 10 years ago

Function hosting.

rco87862• 10 years ago

How does this work when a database/persistence layer gets involved? Having a DB connection per function that calls it seems bad.

rbanffy• 10 years ago

My guess is that you'll want something that doesn't have a stateful connection. HTTPS with an authentication header is one possible solution.

jedberg3• 10 years ago

This seems to come up every time serverless comes up. There should probably be some better docs around this.

It's true each function needs it's own connection, but in reality:

1) The containers actually stick around for a while and get reused so if you write the code correctly it only has to establish the connection once per container invocation

2) Unless you are doing a lot of traffic you'll probably only realistically have a few containers running your functions so it will only be a few connections.

3) If you end up with enough traffic that it actually becomes a problem, it would have been a problem anyway because you'd be running a lot of servers with persistent connections in a more traditional model.

In other words, the number of connects and set up and tear down is about the same as in a traditional setup, maybe just a little bit more.

Edit: One more thing. Sometimes a counter I hear is "Yeah but every function needs it's own connection". I counter that with the contention that even with a traditional setup, a good abstraction means only one or maybe two functions actually talks to the database -- everyone else should be getting their data from that function. Also if you do it that way that one function can do some smart caching (which survives at least a few minutes with serverless).

rco87862• 10 years ago

If you end up with enough traffic that it actually becomes a problem, it would have been a problem anyway because you'd be running a lot of servers with persistent connections in a more traditional model.

I think this is the part I disagree with. DB connection pools are much, much smaller than than the total # of functions that touch a database in any reasonably complex application.

Yes, scale is always an issue, but it seems to me that in this serverless world where you have 1 connection per function you run into scale issues a lot(order of magnitude?) faster than the "traditional" way.

a good abstraction means only one or maybe two functions actually talks to the database

In a serverless world, does this mean you would run a handful of functions with DB connections, and other functions would proxy db requests through them? I can see that working ok I suppose.

justinclift• 10 years ago

Wouldn't it also be reasonable to use a remote API call to store data too?

It's one of the things I have in mind for https://dbhub.io. Thinking it should be a good fit (especially for Serverless apps), but haven't yet written the code to try it out.

Likely to do so in near future though (weeks, not months).

michaelmior• 10 years ago

Does anyone else find the period in "V.1" odd? It seems like it should be V0.1, not V1.0.

syngrog66• 10 years ago

horrible name

IanCal• 10 years ago

Good work on the funding.

I saw a link on the side to sign up for a beta of the serverless platform, so I did but just keep getting redirected back to the blog post. Is anything supposed to happen?

cyberferret• 10 years ago

Nice work! I am delving into setting up services on Lambda at the moment, and it can get really fiddly and messy. I like the way server<framework scaffolds projects and makes deployment a one line option. Interested to see where this goes.

elcct• 10 years ago

I hope something like "AWSless" will follow soon :)

Releasing Serverless Framework V.1, and Fundraising

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