Show HN: Fx - Poor man's serverless framework

Show HN: Fx - Poor man's serverless framework(github.com)

53 points by metrue 8 years ago | 19 comments

Gys 8 years ago |

Sorry if I mistunderstand. The readme is very limited. But this need a (vps or something) server that I own / manage ? It does not seem to upload the functions(s) to some cloud ?

In general I think 'serverless' means deploying code without managing some kind of server yourself.

jensvdh 8 years ago | |

It's a poor man's readme

quickthrower2 8 years ago | |

Get your roomie to deploy it. Then it's serverless to you.

metrue 8 years ago |

Your guys are so right about fx’s ‘Poor man’s README, I will update it soon. Long story short, you can deploy fx on a host (cloud or localhost), then you can deploy a function to be a service in few seconds, just like AWS lambda ( but Poor man’s lambda).

kennu 8 years ago |

Even the README says you need to start a server. So it’s not quite serverless.

(“Serverless”, at least to me, means a platform where I don’t have to worry about running servers.)

proc0 8 years ago | |

I think serverless refers to the use of 'lamdas' as the unit of deployment, as oppose to containers or VM's, but someone else may want to add/edit that.

metrue 8 years ago | |

README is not quiet clear, but for my understanding, lambda is kinda thing that helps you to do serverless, but lambda is also running on some kind of server maintained by AWS, right? fx is kind of lambda, but owned by yourself.

kennu 8 years ago | | |

Well, yes, you can run your own server to provide yourself a serverless platform, but it kind of defeats the purpose... Since then you end up having to maintain your server anyway.

I suppose there may be a point to it if the serverless platform is extremely stable and never has any security issues or other things to update.

bitwize 8 years ago | |

Well, the server is abstracted away and vanishes in a puff of logic, you see.

caust1c 8 years ago |

Isn't this just `up`?

https://github.com/apex/up

joshstrange 8 years ago | |

It looks like up for running something like express/koa/etc while fx is for functions (like AWS Lambda). They are both "serverless" but that's about all they share in common AFAICT. Thanks for mentioning "up" though, I'd never heard of it before, very cool.

turtlebits 8 years ago | |

`up` looks like it only runs on AWS. This seems nice as the only requirement is docker and I can run it on my $3USD VPS

tjholowaychuk 8 years ago | | |

Yep it uses AWS Lambda currently, you'll usually end up paying < $1 for small side projects such as https://gh-polls.com/ etc, but it definitely depends on your traffic.

This project looks like it's more FaaS style (sans the self-healing / autoscaling etc). Up is more application oriented, it just happens to use Lambda.

fiatjaf 8 years ago | | |

Where do you get such a cheap VPS? I'm paying $5!

subway 8 years ago | |

But this one's written in... Oh.

abiox 8 years ago | |

are you suggesting it's similar, or that it's a fork, or something else?