It can work. My current company uses a rule system to represent most of our business logic since it is so dynamic. The downside is that we have to rebuild the entire graph into memory (times the number of threads, times the number of app servers) every time anything changes (which is constant).
Facebook wrote about rebuilding a similar system in Haskell that only changes memory incrementally, so it's definitely possible to do better.
Yes that's exactly the domain that Plug sits in. It's an interface from web servers to applications. As someone who tinkered around with Rack and Ruby web servers a lot, Plug is much better designed (yay for learning from past implementations).
Actually, the car is one of the best listening environments most people have ready access to - an enclosed space (perhaps dolby 5.1) with sufficient bass, with all the channels pointed more or less equally at your head. Many audio engineers use a car as a reference point.
I would bet a few shekels that the parent just finished reading the recent "Records Ruin The Landscape" by David Grubbs and is making it count on the internet.
I hadn't heard of that until you mentioned it. I'm familiar with many of the works listed at [1], but considering the reported theses for a moment "new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s actively thwarted the form of the LP" and
"listeners coming to know a period through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians that largely disavowed recordings." [1] I think is interesting and ironic. But, my argument isn't about the mismatch of recording technology and artistic activity, but of mass reproduction and especially the optimization of recordings for profit.
Even without creative performances such as the Fluxus movements and sound artists of that era, pop music can flourish without massive lithography. The beautiful thing is it perpetuates itself through continuous reinterpretation by musicians and listeners, resulting in an accelerated, rich evolution. That's how we got dance steps like the Tango.
Rails is at least an order of magnitude more widespread than Django/Laravel/any of its imitators. If you take a swing at any of the follow-ons, its proponents will invariably say it's just doing what Rails does. Try to imagine a "Why Django sucks" flamepost garnering anywhere near the attention that the same does for Rails... yeah, won't happen.
Define horrific. The traffic that generates those calls also generates lots of revenue :) It is also extremely spikey. This is a big win for Lambda since we are only pay for what we need and don't have to worry about scaling EC2 up and down to meet demand.
I have one hard example I can share. We had a node service that was running on ec2 and cost ~$2500/mo. Moved the code directly over to lambda. Now ~$400/mo.
Quantifying other costs is a bit harder but do you have a DevOps person on your team? Or multiple people? How much do they get paid?
Practically any smaller instance type (i.e. m3.medium) can handle this small of a load all by itself, without even breaking a sweat.. and instead of paying $74 per day, it would cost less than $74 per month.
In fact, ELB + an ASG of three t2.micro's running continuously would cost around $49 per month, not per day, and possibly around the same amount of effort (or less) to create/maintain/manage.
It's somewhat apples and oranges, but there's no doubt that lambda is expensive compared to plain old EC2, and that cost disparity increases linearly with scale.
Yeah for sure, you're right in that a machine or even machines across different AZ for HA can have better economics for performance.
But you have api management to sort out and versions to solve which api gateway can do fairly easily.
API gateway is connected to Cloudfront for low latency.
You can simply add a cache for your API.
You have analytics already setup up and ready to go.
Also other things like API keys, auth and cognito integration with other integrations etc that API gateway has.
You can deploy and maintain tens of lambda functions fairly easy, to get something similar you would either have to use some container service like ECS or Kubernetes so have to figure them out compared to just deploying your code with one of the frameworks out there for lambda.
That's true, and also you can use all of those (Cloudfront, analytics, API gateway, etc) with EC2 instead if you prefer. API gateway has its own (strengths and) weaknesses compared to a probably more mature server-based API platform. (and don't forget about things like Elastic Beanstalk.)
I'm not looking to put down Lambda, although it could maybe be a bit cheaper; we use EC2/ELB/ASG extensively with Userify but we might use Lambda for eventing-based services in the future. Evaluating each on its own merits will probably give you the best picture of what's right for your project and team.
