6 items tagged “serverless”
2024
Bringing Python to Workers using Pyodide and WebAssembly (via) Cloudflare Workers is Cloudflare’s serverless hosting tool for deploying server-side functions to edge locations in their CDN.
They just released Python support, accompanied by an extremely thorough technical explanation of how they got that to work. The details are fascinating.
Workers runs on V8 isolates, and the new Python support was implemented using Pyodide (CPython compiled to WebAssembly) running inside V8.
Getting this to work performantly and ergonomically took a huge amount of work.
There are too many details in here to effectively summarize, but my favorite detail is this one:
“We scan the Worker’s code for import statements, execute them, and then take a snapshot of the Worker’s WebAssembly linear memory. Effectively, we perform the expensive work of importing packages at deploy time, rather than at runtime.” # 2nd April 2024, 4:09 pm
2022
Deploying Python web apps as AWS Lambda functions. After literally years of failed half-hearted attempts, I finally managed to deploy an ASGI Python web application (Datasette) to an AWS Lambda function! Here are my extensive notes. # 19th September 2022, 4:05 am
Netlify Edge Functions: A new serverless runtime powered by Deno. You can now run Deno scripts directly in Netlify’s edge CDN—bundled as part of their default pricing plan. Interesting that they decided to host it on Deno’s Deno Deploy infrastructure. The hello world example is pleasingly succinct:
export default () => new Response(“Hello world”) # 19th April 2022, 4:46 pm
2020
Portable Cloud Functions with the Python Functions Framework (via) The new functions-framework library on PyPI lets you run Google Cloud Functions written in Python in other environments—on your local developer machine or bundled in a Docker container for example. I have real trouble trusting serverless platforms that lock you into a single provider (AWS Lambda makes me very uncomfortable) so this is a breath of fresh air. # 10th January 2020, 4:58 am
2018
Serverless for data scientists (via) Slides and accompanying notes from a talk by Mike Lee Williams at PyBay, providing an overview of Zappa and diving a bit more deeply into pywren, which makes it trivial to parallelize a function across a set of AWS lambda instances (serverless Python map() execution essentially). I really like this format for sharing presentations—I used something similar for my own PyBay talk. # 25th August 2018, 11:01 pm
2017
Serverless is a somewhat unhelpfully misleading term for “highly scalable stateless code”. All the times I’ve seen serverless stuff work really well it was workloads that were usually zero but occasionally 30k/sec without warning. I’ve run a company with that kind of workload and serverless stuff would have saved us a ton of money. Publishing to the [npm] registry could be done as a serverless app but there’s little benefit because we do not get huge spikes in publishing. We get huge spikes in *downloads* but serverless isn’t useful there because it’s a read-only case and very little processing is done. Serverless is a great solution to one type of problem. It’s very seldom the case that you can convert all your problems into that shape.
— Laurie Voss # 20th October 2017, 2:54 pm