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Monday. Monday. Monday. Open

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wide depth fans. Get ready

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to stuff your

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face with JavaScript CSS. Load

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dancing, soft skill web development.

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The hasty s, the craziest, the

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Sarah CUDA, bars. And Scottsdale,

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Toro, lungo, Tolitzky.

0:28

Welcome to you, Syntaxfm

0:30

this Monday hasty treat, we're gonna

0:32

be pushing it to the limit. And

0:34

I'm talking about the limit of serverless. We're gonna

0:36

be talking about Serverless limitations in

0:39

some some situations maybe where serverless

0:42

has changed how you work

0:45

Not not things you can't get around, but maybe some

0:47

things to be aware of. My name is Scott Tielinski.

0:50

I'm developer from Denver. With me, as

0:52

always, is Wes BOSS. Hey,

0:54

everybody. Hey, Wes. How's it going, man? That's

0:57

going good. I'm excited to talk about serverless

0:59

limitations. Yeah. Serverless

1:02

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dot com sick. Serverless

3:15

West, do you wanna give a little bit of background on,

3:17

like, where this idea came from and

3:19

what what you're thinking here? Yeah. So

3:21

I've was just going through a little bit of

3:23

updating of my personal website. And

3:26

I've got, I don't know, four or five different serverless

3:28

functions for doing things like generating

3:32

the images

3:34

for Twitter preview. I got another

3:36

one that fetches my Instagram feed, another

3:38

one that fetches my Twitter feed, and A

3:40

couple other ones in there. And

3:43

I I hit a couple of road bumps here

3:45

and and over the years

3:47

of writing little serverless functions here or

3:49

there, I've I've hit a couple little bumps.

3:51

And I thought, like, yeah, it's

3:54

serverless is awesome. However,

3:56

the upside of of getting

3:59

something that is infinitely

4:01

scalable and cheap and all that is

4:03

there's always some sort of constraint. Right?

4:05

whenever you work yourselves into and and

4:07

we could probably extend this not just to

4:10

serverless functions, but also edge

4:12

functions. And anytime that

4:14

you get something that is better, you

4:16

generally are giving up something else.

4:18

And that that's just a general rule in

4:20

life, I guess. So I

4:22

thought, like, let's just, like, rattle through a bunch of

4:24

sort of limitations. These are not necessarily

4:27

bad things about Serverless. but

4:29

just things that you have to think

4:31

about your application in a little bit of a

4:33

different way than maybe

4:35

you have thought about in the past with a

4:37

traditional long running server

4:39

rendered application or server app, not

4:41

server rendered. That's that's something

4:43

totally different. So the first

4:45

one is a function limit

4:48

So there is generally a limitation

4:50

to how big a function can

4:52

be. Fifty megs is the one

4:54

for AWS. You might

4:56

think, like, fifty megs. Like, I'm never

4:58

gonna write fifty megs of JavaScript. Take

5:01

a peek in your node modules. How big is

5:03

your node modules folder? for

5:05

for everything you want. You can get

5:08

out of the something

5:10

as simple as, like, a text

5:12

to emoji library, you can

5:14

rack up sixty megs

5:17

real quick of just

5:19

libraries because server

5:22

server libraries don't have to

5:24

worry about size while they do

5:26

because that's why we're talking about it. But so

5:28

there's generally not as much of a -- Yeah. --

5:30

historically. Yeah. Where

5:32

I hit it was I was using puppeteer,

5:35

and puppeteer is a headless chrome

5:37

browser. And what pop what I use

5:39

puppeteer four is

5:41

I have a page on my

5:43

website that renders thumbnails out,

5:46

and I do that so I can have

5:48

full HTML, full CSS

5:51

full JavaScript to make my thumbnails

5:53

for my Twitter previews

5:56

Open Graph Previews. Right? Which is And I

5:58

know because I do

6:00

Claudinary and, like -- Yeah. --

6:02

trying to no

6:03

shade on Claudinary because I love them.

6:05

But it's certainly not HTML and CSS.

6:07

I wish I was doing it that way. Yeah.

6:09

It's true. And if people always send me,

6:11

Verstel has like a SVG version of

6:13

it, I want full ass, HTML,

6:15

and CSS. And I wanna just wanna take a screenshot

6:17

of it, you know, full ass

6:20

HTML ones. That

6:22

should be important. talk

6:25

about Lumi. That's a chink

6:27

good domain name. So

6:30

the problem is is that

6:32

Chromium

6:32

has it grows.

6:34

Every time they add a feature to Chrome,

6:36

the bundle of Chromium grows.

6:38

And we hit we've hit an inflection point

6:40

now where it's forty nine

6:42

point seven megs. And

6:45

so you literally I was running

6:47

Chromium twenty lines of

6:49

code and some

6:51

other library to load in puppeteer for it. And

6:53

I was going over by

6:55

three megs. And I was like, I brought it up

6:57

with the package author and he says, yeah. Like, that's

7:00

Chrome is just bigger now. So

7:02

you can no longer put Chromium into

7:04

a serverless function option.

7:07

Okay. The solution there

7:09

is you use and AWS

7:11

has a thing, is anytime you have something larger

7:13

like an entire browser that needs

7:15

to go on a serverless function. Use something

7:17

called a layer in in AWS Lambda.

7:20

And the layer will just kind of have it

7:22

ready for you. and then you only have to ship the

7:24

code that actually runs it and it's it'll be

7:26

like ten k

7:28

instead of fifty megs. But

7:31

for sale, Nellify, all these

7:33

companies don't and all

7:35

these companies that are, like, easy to host stuff,

7:37

they don't give you access to layers. That's like just

7:39

a AWS thing. Actually, begin dot

7:41

com does. So

7:43

I have to move to something else or

7:45

I talk to the author, he's gonna bundle Chrome

7:48

with some less flags. Like like, there's

7:50

stuff in Chrome that I don't need, like,

7:52

GPU stuff and and three

7:54

d stuff, so maybe they can bundle

7:56

chrome with that. But that is the function

7:59

limit. You'll be you'll be surprised

8:01

how quickly a

8:03

serverless function can go over fifty megs

8:05

once they start getting everything in.

8:08

Solutions to that ES build, that

8:10

brought it down about five megs for me

8:12

switching from webpack to e s build.

8:15

Tree shaking will help as well. Were you

8:17

using ESM Is that why?

8:19

or did you say in CJS with

8:21

that? You just I'm better. I

8:24

was in common j s for the

8:26

thing. I believe that I tried to

8:28

switch it over? because that that was

8:30

gonna be my question. It's like, can ESM

8:32

help here as well? I don't think so

8:34

because ESB build

8:36

and Webpack knows how to

8:38

tree shake regardless of

8:41

of which which type that

8:43

you're in. And the dependencies are not

8:45

necessarily all shipped as ESM. So you

8:47

still have to have a conversion process

8:50

there. Next one we have here.

8:52

Node support. this is

8:54

more of an edge thing and I believe

8:56

that it will be going away soon.

8:58

But when you run a

9:01

function in cloudflare workers is probably

9:03

the big one, but also if

9:05

you like Vercell, NextJazz,

9:07

middleware, those things are running in

9:09

edge functions and they don't have

9:11

full blown node support

9:13

in there. It is just a pared

9:16

down JavaScript environment. So if

9:18

you wanna run a whole bunch of

9:20

stuff in that, I you

9:22

don't have access to Olive node. So again,

9:24

there's rate that comes with the

9:26

ability to run fast.

9:28

I believe I saw something the other day

9:30

that Cloudflare is rolling out full

9:32

NPM support. because that

9:34

has always been a sticking point

9:36

for me -- Mhmm. -- is that, like,

9:38

yeah, I'm fine with this, I

9:40

guess, as an edge function, functions generally sits

9:42

in between your request and your

9:44

response and sort of does stuff in the middle,

9:46

kinda like middleware. That's why they use it

9:48

in an XGS

9:50

middleware. But,

9:52

yeah, it's it's you don't always

9:54

have full node available, and then that

9:56

really limits packages that you could

9:58

possibly use inside of that

9:59

function, totally. Next one, Braun

10:02

Jobs. I have a tweet

10:04

that's like years old and people reply to it

10:06

every couple months, hey, is there an a solution

10:08

to this yet? Not

10:10

every serverless provider

10:12

or framework gives you

10:14

the ability to do kron jobs. Ark,

10:17

Brian Laroo, begin dot com,

10:19

does have it, but things

10:21

like Vercell doesn't have it. I

10:23

Does

10:24

Nellify have it? Let's do a

10:25

quick Google. Yeah. So

10:27

Nellify Nellify has

10:29

scheduled

10:29

functions Yeah. Render has something

10:32

like that as well. Yeah. Render is

10:34

not serverless though. Oh. I thought they

10:36

had they have functions.

10:38

They

10:38

have over prime jobs.

10:41

You can have a service that is just

10:43

a straight up crowd job. I guess that's not --

10:45

Yeah. -- that's

10:45

not a little section. That's a thing with

10:47

Serverless. A crown job is -- Yeah. -- that's

10:50

the most simple thing ever. You set up a

10:52

crown job and it runs when you want it with

10:54

serverless function is the

10:56

they don't always have the ability to

10:58

do crown jobs. And the solution that

11:01

everybody always says is just use

11:03

this service. And that always

11:05

kills me when part of your

11:07

infrastructure is eight dollars

11:09

a month to run a crun job. That's not a

11:11

good solution to me. Next

11:13

one, local development isn't one to one. So

11:15

again, we talk about different environments. Cloudflare

11:17

has done a really good job at making

11:19

this local thing called mini flare.

11:22

It tries to replicate it,

11:25

but I still run into issues,

11:27

not just Cloudflare alone. This

11:30

is all things is that your

11:32

local environment does not look like

11:34

your deployed environment. And

11:36

in in the past, people would use Docker

11:38

to do that And I guess you still

11:40

can deploy Docker, but it's still

11:43

hit bumps bumps in the

11:45

road. Mhmm. Database access

11:47

isn't straightforward. Oh, yeah. That's actually

11:49

a concern of mine. Yeah. If you wanna use

11:51

something as simple as what's

11:54

the text based database

11:56

that is awesome as execute. If you

11:58

only use SQLite, serverless

12:00

functions are spread amongst many

12:03

servers when they scale up. So there isn't, like, a

12:05

just one server that has it. that that also

12:07

is the case when you do you

12:09

have multiple servers running on, like,

12:11

something like Digital Ocean as well. But

12:14

Same with database access, you need to

12:16

pool connections because you fire up

12:18

a thousand serverless

12:20

functions at once. You're gonna make a thousand

12:22

connections to your database. and

12:24

that's not ideal. So then you have an additional

12:27

step and an additional infrastructure to

12:29

pool your connections, which is

12:31

you have one service that connects

12:33

to the database, and then all of

12:36

your serverless functions talk to

12:38

the pool instead of going

12:40

directly into the database. Sharing

12:43

code, not always easy. So

12:45

if you have six serverless

12:47

functions and you have a bunch of, like, shared code between the

12:49

two. You can't just like

12:51

some sometimes the bundlers don't do a

12:53

great job at sharing code

12:55

between between the two. And this is something I've

12:57

hit many times over again

12:59

or it's just like, can I just be able to

13:01

require something from a different folder and

13:03

you figure it out? it's been a pain in my

13:05

side for a while. Environmental

13:08

variables. This is something I hit

13:10

with NetLify the other day. AWS,

13:12

so I should explain. Versal,

13:15

NetLify, begin all of

13:17

these these things are not running their own

13:19

serverless functions. They sit on top of what

13:21

is called AWS Lambda. and they get

13:23

they make it a lot easier to do this type of thing,

13:25

and they provide a whole

13:27

bunch of, like, tooling and infrastructure on

13:29

top of it. So

13:31

the environmental

13:33

variables on an AWS Lambda.

13:36

Lambda is four k, which is

13:38

one thousand twenty four characters.

13:40

You might think, oh, that that's quite a bit.

13:42

But sometimes you have these very long

13:45

generated strings that need to be set

13:47

as environmental variables. and

13:49

you run over it. In my case, I was

13:51

on NetLify, and NetLify

13:54

sends all of your environmental variables

13:56

including things like production

13:58

server, dev server. I had a bunch of

14:00

URLs as NetForty. And I ran

14:02

out. I hit that I was

14:04

here renaming my variables to

14:06

be the shortest variable names

14:08

as possible. Oh

14:10

my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. and

14:12

because they have to send it all to the serverless

14:14

function because I've my site wouldn't

14:16

deploy. The next morning, they

14:18

announced that you can

14:20

scope things to just be

14:22

NetLify and just be serverless functions. So

14:24

that's no longer a concern,

14:26

but it's something you think about. Keep

14:28

your environment, variable names

14:30

short. Yeah. Yeah. I've never even

14:32

that's not anything that I would have thought about ever.

14:35

No. Me neither. Until it hit, and I

14:37

was frustrated. Time outs.

14:40

Cloudflare is ten second

14:42

or sorry, ten millisecond time

14:45

out. You must reply that's the reason.

14:47

Cloudflare is a pared down environment. You

14:49

don't have three seconds to go to an

14:51

API, fetch something and come back on

14:53

Cloudflare. You have ten milliseconds

14:55

to do what you want because generally,

14:57

Cloudflare is sitting you sort

14:59

of do the work on the way to your website,

15:01

not as the endpoint. That's the

15:03

difference between the edge function Serverless function.

15:05

Mhmm. Most serverless

15:07

functions tap out at ten

15:09

seconds So if you wanna

15:11

do something for a longer amount of

15:13

time, scheduled functions, which are

15:15

functions that don't run when

15:17

somebody hits a URL in the browser, but

15:19

they run every thirty minutes or at

15:21

two o'clock every morning. Those have a thirty

15:23

second time out. So If you need to

15:25

fetch a bunch of data and you need to

15:28

wait ten seconds between the two, then you have

15:30

to split it over multiple functions

15:32

and then you're dealing with databases because there's

15:34

no shared memory between them and --

15:36

Oh. -- that could be a bit of a pain. Yeah.

15:38

Yeah. See, like, these are things that you

15:40

take for granted. in

15:42

the regular old server world

15:44

that are not

15:46

easy in -- Yeah. -- serverless

15:48

world. SaaS is

15:50

expensive. I had a tweet the other day where

15:52

everyone's like serverless is super cheap,

15:54

but here I am signing up

15:56

for my ninth nine dollar a month around

15:59

my website and you realize, oh, okay,

16:02

this can get really expensive. And that's a

16:04

joke because AWS

16:06

straight up is very, very cheap. Their

16:08

free plan is probably more than

16:10

I would need for most of my projects.

16:12

But once you

16:14

start realizing, I need a build

16:16

pipeline and a test runner and a

16:18

GUI and all that type of stuff

16:21

that you realize, okay, maybe maybe

16:23

I'm not using it. AWS has a bunch

16:25

of tooling around it. And quite honestly, I need

16:27

to I need to

16:29

familiarize myself

16:32

with it. because

16:32

it

16:33

seems like that's probably the way to go

16:35

with a lot of the stuff. Yeah. Just get

16:37

good at AWS. Yeah. does

16:39

that's why people are good at it. So they don't you're not paying

16:42

somebody else who knows how it works and

16:44

and sitting on top of it. Like,

16:48

like, what's the minimum I don't know if we

16:50

should talk about how much pricing now.

16:52

I'll leave that. We're getting kinda here. But

16:54

just look at, like, a lot of these companies

16:57

that do serverless

17:00

for you. Look at how much it

17:02

costs just to own

17:04

an account. with them, not to run-in anything, run-in to do

17:06

any bandwidth or something like that. Often, you

17:08

just have to pay per seat. You got five

17:10

developers on your team. You're paying nine bucks

17:12

a month. for every

17:14

developer. Cool. That adds up quickly. For

17:16

a lot of companies, maybe not.

17:18

But

17:18

for for some people, it is where whereas you're

17:20

used to spending five bucks a month for a digital

17:22

ocean droplet and and you're good to

17:24

go. Yeah. Right. I asked on Twitter as

17:26

well what people thought Brian

17:29

Larew from begin dot com. He said infrastructure

17:31

as code is crucial. That's kinda a

17:33

really good one is you

17:36

can't rely on somebody

17:38

knowing which buttons to click in

17:40

the AWS console. You can't

17:42

rely on someone because if you have to set it

17:44

up again. You're not gonna remember that. So

17:46

your infrastructure has to be a configuration

17:49

file. It has to be JSON

17:51

or Yamal that you can easily redeploy in

17:54

the future. A lot

17:56

of people said cold starts,

17:59

were

17:59

an issue, which is essentially

18:02

when you don't run a

18:03

serverless function for a

18:06

while, it

18:06

will go to sleep. running on

18:08

any server anywhere. And that's that's why

18:10

serverless functions are so nice is that if

18:12

you you're trying you're trying

18:14

to share the Amazon services

18:17

servers with the rest of the world. And if your

18:20

generate PDF function

18:22

that you run once a month for

18:24

two minutes is not

18:27

gonna run for twenty nine more days

18:29

after that, then that thing goes to sleep and

18:31

it's not using any resources. That's the

18:33

benefit of it. But the

18:36

downside is that if you need to to have

18:38

that spun up and

18:40

reply very quickly, that

18:42

there could be a cold start issue

18:44

there. That's not something I'm super familiar

18:46

with, but it seems like

18:48

it's becoming less and less of an

18:50

issue every single time that I talk about it. So I'm not sure

18:52

about that. Yeah.

18:54

Seems like those functions

18:55

are going to sleep really

18:57

easily. and can't we could

18:59

have those functions talk to my kids

19:01

and say, yay. Love it.

19:04

And then the last I have your

19:06

search offerings are

19:09

not ideal.

19:10

Because with with search,

19:12

you need to, like, be constantly indexing

19:15

your database for things.

19:17

And that's a

19:18

serverless function can only run for thirty

19:20

seconds at a time. you

19:22

need a you need like a a server that's constantly always

19:24

doing that type of stuff. So

19:26

everybody always says, what's the big

19:28

one out there? What's

19:30

the now? forgetting. Yeah.

19:34

Algoia. That's the wild.

19:36

Algoia. Yeah. Yeah. So

19:38

the solution, again, to a lot of this,

19:40

is use the service. But and

19:43

I love Ogloo. Yeah. I think it's amazing,

19:45

but it is a very expensive once you get

19:47

going on large data sets. So you

19:49

gotta you gotta be careful there as

19:51

well. That's my thoughts on

19:53

serverless limitations. just

19:56

things you need to know about when you

19:58

are approaching a new project with

20:00

serverless and hopefully that's some helpful stuff in

20:02

there. Yeah. I

20:02

learned a lot. Holy cow. Well, thanks so

20:05

much, Wes. Alright. No problem. Catch you

20:07

later. Peace. Peace. Head

20:09

on over to f

20:11

m for you. full archive of all of our shows. And

20:14

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