
Erllambda: Run Erlang and Elixir in AWS Lambda - codeadict
https://github.com/alertlogic/erllambda
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bsaul
Every time i read this kind of news i wonder : is there any real point to use
erlang if you’re not taking advantage of its concurrency model ?

Since the lambda model means concurrency is completely managed by the
platform, why would you code in this language ?

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mercer
I can't speak for Erlang, but I use Elixir and not primarily for the
concurrency model. I just really like the language (and it's functional-but-
accessible approach), relative speed (compared to Ruby), fault-tolerance,
community.

In particular the fault tolerance and process-based approach is just awesome.
I regularly find myself writing code with just the 'happy path' (and only the
obvious error handling), which just feels a ton nicer than the more defensive
approach I generally take in other languages.

The tooling around the language is also really nice.

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macintux
I can’t speak for Elixir, but I love Erlang for exactly those reasons.

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mercer
Ha, I do suppose all those count for Erlang too. I get the impression that
syntax-wise it's very much a matter of taste, although for some Elixir's
macros might make it preferable.

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regularfry
I've been saying for a while that Lambda (and serverless in general) should
just be a compilation target, not a Radically New Computing Concept(tm). This
is another inch towards that.

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vazamb
I think it is already through libraries. At least for lambda in python you
have libraries (Zappa for example) that allow you to write basic flask and
Django apps and then deploy them to lambda. These apps can still be deployed
the "old" way with no or minor modifications

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skrebbel
Does this run a separate Beam instance for every Function? If so, isnt that an
enormous waste of Erlang? If not, how isolated are requests? Can I send
messages between them? Should I?

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kenhwang
Maybe it shares a beam instance per AWS account. Definitely curious about the
isolation level of lambda in general since the same comment also applies to
the JVM.

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dvcrn
This means AWS would keep a beam instance running for you the entire time? I
doubt that

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kenhwang
I assume it'll cold boot one up for you if you didn't already have on running
on first request, keep it around for a while, and when it becomes idle for a
while, shut it down. There's a lot of blog content out there to try to ping
lambda enough so the instance stays around to avoid the cold boot issue.

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ghayes
If only there were a feature of lambda where it stayed up all the time...

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jeffasinger
Never having a cold boot isn't quite the same as being able to set a minimum
concurrency level, though both would be very valuable.

At re:invent this year, someone on the Lambda team indicated that they were
working on something in this space, but couldn't say exactly what, or give any
real timeline.

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thedoops
Pattern matching is a good fit for lambda use cases.

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cthalupa
Yep! Single biggest reason I'm excited for this.

Nearly 100% of the lambda functions I've written could make use of
erlang/elixir style pattern matching.

