Build and Deploy Serverless React Apps with Next.js 8 and Zeit Now

https://blog.hasura.io/build-and-deploy-serverless-apps-with-nextjs-8-zeit-now/

by praveenweb • 7 years ago

89 49 7 years ago

blog.hasura.io

infocollector• 7 years ago

Are there any good NextJS tutorials out there that you can link here? I am looking to learn NextJS. Thanks

Scooty2• 7 years ago

The nextjs website has a tutorial that I found very helpful:

https://nextjs.org/learn/

siquick• 7 years ago

Definitely one of the better official tutorials out there

barbecue_sauce2• 7 years ago

I dislike the forced login to read the tutorials. I get that it's a Zeit project, but this smacks of user farming.

reacttricks• 7 years ago

Here's a large list of Next.js tutorials: https://reactresources.com/topics/nextjs

yodon2• 7 years ago

Conceptually one lambda per page (route) sounds super cool, but in practice I suspect it would lead to a ton of cold start wait times for less common routes

rozenmd• 7 years ago

Sounds like a trade-off for extreme scalability

bpicolo• 7 years ago

Shouldn't change your ability to scale. AWS is happy to clone your single lambda an arbitrary amount of times.

yodon2• 7 years ago

Yes, where needed, but I suspect for most people it's just a trade off of getting buzzword compliance in exchange for slow cold start responses

matrix0978• 7 years ago

these individual pages get compiled into a single file with zero dependencies leading to super fast cold start times. I'm a bot, beep boop.

painful2• 7 years ago

Have you actually found cold-start delays to be an issue with serverless services, or are you just speculating? To my knowledge, the cloud provider keeps enough instances hot based on a forecasted demand. I have not found cold-start delays to be a real issue.

zdragnar• 7 years ago

I don't know if anything has changed since, but we definitely hot cold start perf issues on lesser used routes at a company I was with 18 months ago.

scarface74• 7 years ago

AWS doesn’t keep instances warm based on forecasted demand. It uses one instance per request and instances stay warm once they are started for a predetermined amount of time based on the size of tyrvlambda environment.

reilly3000• 7 years ago

It depends on the stack. You have to be more mindful of cold start when running Java/Clojure apps, less with JS and .net. There are some good benchmarks out there. There are also some easy ways to keep routes warm, although for certain setups I imagine that could be quite expansive, though still probably not expensive.

dane-pgp• 7 years ago

For apps that just do basic things like read and write to a database (e.g. DynamoDB) would it be possible to go a stage beyond serverless and have the code that runs in the user's browser talk to the database directly?

Obviously you'd have to be careful about permissions, and integrate with Cognito, but there are REST APIs for talking to AWS services so I'm sure there are use cases where even the lambdas are not necessary.

I don't know what such an architecture would be called, other than "serverlessless".

cldellow• 7 years ago

Depending on your threat model, absolutely. Cognito supports issuing temporary IAM credentials, so you can have granular permissions, billing and auditing.

I debated doing this for a side project but decided it was a little too risky for my use case. For a corporate/intranet thing, though, it'd absolutely be reasonable.

dustingetz• 7 years ago

you can’t trust the browser client at all, but setting that aside it isn’t very reliable, much better to queue up commands and then do real work on server (what happens when some third party service is down?)

zinckiwi• 7 years ago

Until the introduction of Cloud Function support, I believe that was essentially the execution model for Firebase.

eranation• 7 years ago

Other than what others mentioned (Cognito with temporary credentials) I think AppSync might be close to what you are looking for https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/ It has a GraphQL API and supports DynamoDB as a data source

tirumaraiselvan5• 7 years ago

Apart from permissions, which can perhaps be solved by temp credentials etc, how do you prevent 1) DDoS: someone fiddling the queries to result in db outage, 2) scale: browsers can't leverage connection pooling so not sure if DB can handle so many client connections.

fulafel6• 7 years ago

How do serverless apps usually prevent DDoS? If it's using API Gateway features, couldn't you just proxy DynamoDB calls through API Gateway?

I think connection pooling is not relevant to DynamoDB.

debaserab2• 7 years ago

It's not ever direct though. There's an HTTP intermediary - either you're controlling it, or Amazon is.

rkangel• 7 years ago

This is exactly the model that Firebase is aiming to support. Cloud Firestore is accessed directly through the various client libraries (Android, iOS, JS). Firestore has a permissions system to control who can access what, based on Firebase Auth user ids, and then when you need little bits of server side stuff you can put it in cloud functions.

cwyers• 7 years ago

This article hits one of my biggest pet peeves -- _tell the reader what you're about_. Presumably, the reason you have this on the Hasura blog is at least in part lead generation, right? And it worked, in that I showed up on Hasura's website never having heard of them before. But the article makes no effort to tell me what Hasura is before throwing me in the deepend. A link wouldn't go amiss, either. (Yes, I know there's one in the header. It's better to have one in the article text too. Links are free, better to have more than fewer.)

painful2• 7 years ago

I recommend against using Zeit. I tried their offering this year and it was too much in beta. I honestly couldn't even get a basic service deployed because my defined dependencies wouldn't install. My web service deployed fine using the serverless offering of another cloud that I won't name, although it was not AWS. As a disclaimer, I have no conflict of interest.

Untit1ed• 7 years ago

Now is hit-and-miss for me. Works great for the most part but they seem more focused on moving fast than stability.

At one point they (without any warning that I could see) turned on a CDN for all my deployments that didn't take the host header into account... so suddenly all the various URLs leading to my landing page generator all returned a single customer's page. Annoying.

JMTQp8lwXL• 7 years ago

They killed their Docker offering right about after they launched it, mostly because it's too difficult/expensive to scale containers, so they forced their entire user base onto the serverless paradigm, because it was convenient for them. Their PR story is it's "better for everyone", except there remain use cases (aka websocket support) that remain unsolved for months on their new platform. To give them credit, they didn't fully deprecate Docker-- old customers can use it, for an indeterminate amount of time.

nahtnam• 7 years ago

Anyone know of an alternate hosting service that is as simple as including a Dockerfile and changing your DNS, other than Zeit and Heroku?

k__• 7 years ago

Too difficult to scale containers?

Do you have a source for this?

regularfry• 7 years ago

Heh, that's precisely what Amazon did early on. "It's difficult to make servers reliably persist at scale, so everyone should learn how to not need persistent servers, which is better for everyone".

bdickason• 7 years ago

I’ve been using zeit / now for the past two months to host static sites and it’s been excellent. Haven’t tried a node app yet but their core service seems really easy to use and I haven’t had any issues.

fulafel6• 7 years ago

Is the headline benefit really paying only for use? Trading increased complexity & dev effort for this seems like a backwards development when vm/container/heroku-style hosting is so cheap & getting cheaper.

tirumaraiselvan5• 7 years ago

The complexity and dev effort is higher initially because the paradigm is so different from "localhost" development. But once the initial boilerplate and yak-shaving work is done, serverless can actually be easier to manage because you deal at a much smaller functional level.

collyw2• 7 years ago

I have never used "serverless", but how does that differ from say a Django app?

You have the initial boilerplate setting up the project, then you map urls to functions. Once the initial setup is done its trivial to map a new urls to new functions.

I am genuinely curious as I can't really work out what all the hype is about regarding serverless. Am I missing something?

eoinmurray92• 7 years ago

I love now.sh - its the best developer experience out there and we really really tried to use it at my company - but we kept on having latency issues. It was consistently 5-10x the TTFB of Heroku or an ec2 instance (all in the same locations, or super close).

Build and Deploy Serverless React Apps with Next.js 8 and Zeit Now

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