Browser Functions: A serverless platform using Web Browser execution engines

https://dev.to/richardyoung00/browser-functions-a-new-serverless-platform-using-web-browser-execution-engines-fk5

20 9 7 years ago

What a brilliant idea... almost a Why Didn't I Think of That Idea!

ksec• 7 years ago

Wouldn't it be very memory inefficient? A browser "tab" isn't exactly a small amount of resource. And I remember there were quite a few problems with headless browser not being perfect ( Although I think that was quite a while ago so things might have improved )

However I do love the idea of Browser Function! It has been a long time since I have been excited with any Web Development tech. So I just need some time to sink in my excitement.

richardyoung003• 7 years ago

Chrome seems to handle memory quite well in headless mode at any rate. The memory footprint isn't tiny, but it seems a fair bit smaller than the container based approaches used by other serverless systems.

throwGuardian• 7 years ago

Isn't this still wrapped in a container. I would assume a commercial deployment would need this isolation - after all chrome allows toggling feature flags, which could bleed across instances if not containerized.

The big benefit to this approach is the availability of WebApis in a Faas environment.

Sonata• 7 years ago

This sounds similar to how Cloudflare Workers work - using the V8 isolate technology built for Chrome to provide secure isolation of backend processes without the overhead of VMs or even containers.

jgrahamc2• 7 years ago

Yes. This is something like Cloudflare Workers (except we built a deep embedding of V8 rather than relying on the browser infrastructure).

https://workers.cloudflare.com/

Plus we have a distributed KV store to go with the code execution environment.

richardyoung003• 7 years ago

Our main reason for relying on the full browser is to not be tied to a specific browser engine, and to be able to benefit from browser security updates really easily, but there are obviously some challenges to this approach.

Browser Functions: A serverless platform using Web Browser execution engines

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