from Hacker News

Cloud Computing Without Containers

by cek on 3/6/20, 8:15 PM with 3 comments

  • by divbzero on 3/7/20, 6:57 AM

    The downside mentioned in the blog post is worth calling out:

    > No technology is magical, every transition comes with disadvantages. An Isolate-based system can’t run arbitrary compiled code. Process-level isolation allows your Lambda to spin up any binary it might need. In an Isolate universe you have to either write your code in Javascript (we use a lot of TypeScript), or a language which targets WebAssembly like Go or Rust.

    It’s also worth noting that for JavaScript the Workers Runtime environment [1] is more similar to the browser than to Node.js. Thus you cannot include NPM packages directly, e.g. you could not simply:

      const express = require('express')
    
    [1]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/reference/apis/sta... "Workers Runtime APIs"
  • by mahesh_rm on 3/7/20, 4:03 AM

    Interesting take, and it makes a lot of sense. Is there an open source framework for handling isolates dedicated to serverless functionality out there?