Elixir on AWS Lambda

Interesting stuff AWS Lambda is news to me. I am interested now. Will look into this if it could work for us

Hmm interesting. So you executing external elixir process through child node module process?

I am wondering how the speed/performance/monitoring … compare to pure nodejs application.
PS
If you don’t like javascript you can write i purescript Purescript on AWS Lambda

i have a phoenix server running and i’m quite pleased with the results. Base invocation time for starting elixir via escript is around 180ms, but since you can now keep something around, although frozen, for 5 minutes invoking a server on lambda makes much more sense. This saves you a ton of time and expense for lambda.

The below client/server takes between 11 and 20 ms to run with 1024MB ram lambda.

• 512MB ram seems to be a sweet spot for an app that does nothing, it performed the same as 1024.
• 256MB was wildly varying between 160 and 200 ms
• 128MB ram results in ~ 230 ms which frankly isn’t bad compared with native node.

server

def test(conn,_params) do
    json conn, %{worked: :true,conn: inspect(conn)}
  end

client

curl localhost:9080/test

I’ll test with a native node.js http request in a few. should be faster…

to add some context here, this means you can run ~100,000 invocations, or phoenix requests, for around $.04 per month in a highly available environment where you can forget about load balancers, patches, ssh keys, etc etc etc.!

Yes I totaly agree - the future is lamda architecure
There are also:

But I don’t know if you can run elixir there.

Maybe someone can explain to me because I don’t get it.

Why use AWS lambda when Elixir can just start a supervised task and perform your work for you? What kind of work would AWS lambda be better for where a lightweight process doesn’t fit better?

i suppose the biggest benefit for me is that the server goes away and I can continue to use elixir.

Let’s say I want to process a file. Old way: i setup a server and let it run for ever waiting for some request. New way. someone dumps a file in an S3 bucket which generates an event that starts my lambda function and processes the file. I’ve just removed all the muck associated with maintaining a server (or 2 or 3 if you need HA) for a trivial task. I really don’t want to think about certs and load balancers, and patches, and security 0days, not to mention the expense of having 2 of everything. Lambda is essentially devops in a box, scaling, HA, all taken care of for literally pennies.

This is not easy task what AWS lamda can do :). You can run the same code on one machine and 1000 machines if needed depends on load. But as developer you don’t care where it runs and how many machines you will need.
The best part you only pay for work AWS lamda do for you , not machines you use for it.
The drawback you need to keep state somewhere else also there is limit how long computation can be executed (I suppose there is 5 minutes)

Just to extend the options you named, there is also Iron Worker which works quite similar to the mentioned cloudfunctions:

https://www.iron.io/platform/ironworker/

With IronWorker you have more power on the environment where your code runs in using Docker.

There are some options

• GitHub - anaibol/awesome-serverless: ☁ A curated list of awesome services, solutions and resources for serverless / nobackend applications. · GitHub
  …
• https://serverless.com/
• https://developer.ibm.com/openwhisk/
• Cloud Run functions | Google Cloud
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/

Example app in Java
https://www.voxxed.com/blog/2017/01/aws-iot-button-lambda-couchbase/