56 posts tagged with "serverless"

In recent years, serverless architectures and edge computing are becoming very popular for application deployments. But storing application state and the data inside a serverless and/or edge function is a different story. There are many difficulties such as; managing the connections to the database, making the data available for fast access from multiple locations etc. There are only a few database services supporting serverless access and very few of those are also suitable for edge functions. (You can read a detailed analysis here.)

At Upstash, from day one, we are providing a serverless Redis compatible database for low latency and with a per-request pricing model. Additionally we expose a first-class REST API built directly on the database. REST API removes the connection management hassle, especially when used in serverless functions, but also accessible even from restricted environments like edge locations or web browsers.

Today we are happy to announce the Global Database, which is a step further to make the database available globally, closer to the clients and edge locations for low latency reads. Global Database is available on free tier, you can try it without any cost.

In this article, I will compare AWS Lambda and Cloudflare Workers based on my experiences and observations during developing applications to showcase Upstash use cases.

Both are similar in that they provide a serverless runtime for developers to run their functions. But there are many differences between them and I will list them in the following categories: Performance, Pricing, Runtime and Language Support, Tools and Resources, Ecosystem and Integrations, Configurability and Limitations. I will declare a winner for each category from my point of view.

Serverless is great for developers who want to build an application end to end with lowest maintenance and financial cost. Serverless functions enable you to run your own code without maintaining the backend infra. But they are stateless by design so you need an external data store. So the next question is which databases are best fit for serverless? The good news is database vendors see the serverless trend and they are either launching either serverless offerings or trying to adapt their product. In this article, I will first list the things that make a database great for serverless. Then I will list the database that I personally think to be candidates to be the great database for Serverless.

• This is a continuation of the blog post published in April,2021.

We built a sample application which compares the performance of leading serverless databases using a common web use case and serverless functions. The databases are DynamoDB, MongoDB (Atlas), Firestore, Cassandra (Datastax Astra), FaunaDB and Redis (Upstash)

1 ms latency is easy with Redis when the database and clients are in the same region. But if you want the clients to be globally distributed then the latency rises over 100 ms. We built Edge Caching to overcome this.

AWS Lambda pioneered serverless space. Many developers think that serverless is the future of development. It gives you the true pay-per-use model, relieves you from the maintenance and scaling of the backend infrastructure. But it also comes with challenges. One of those is its statelessness. You need to keep the state in an external data store. Unfortunately most of the popular data stores are connection based. But as we explained in this post, managing connections can become painful in serverless. That’s why, we have developed a high performance REST API on top of Upstash Redis. In this blog post, I will implement a very basic stateful api (page counter) on AWS Lambda and Upstash Redis using the REST API.

Announcing Upstash Terraform Provider​

We are thrilled to announce that now our Upstash Terraform Provider is publicly available. Our core principle is always being developer friendly. We have announced REST Api recently. Now it is time to expand our tools with the terraform provider plugin.

Terraform is a useful automation tool that lets you define your infrastructure as code. Collaboration becomes crazy easy in this way and every configuration change is persisted so everybody knows what is going on at the infrastructure.

After community requests, we have developed our terraform provider and now it is publicly available in the terraform marketplace.

Upstash supports the REST API in addition to the native Redis API. REST API helps developers to access their Redis without connection issues from serverless and edge functions. But if you execute multiple Redis commands in the same function then this means you will make a call to the database multiple times. One of our community members (@MasterGates) came with a great suggestion in our Discord channel. Pipeline API:

In this article, we will build a Serverless Next.js based TODO application. We will try our best to make it minimalist. It will not have any database connection. It will not have any extra dependency other than Next.js. It will not have any buttons. Besides, minimalism is cool and clean, I love it because I am a lazy developer :)

Why do we avoid database connections?​

Next.js is a modern framework which enables the front-end developers to develop full stack applications. Serverless functions have an important role in simplifying backend development for Next.js developers. As you probably know, serverless functions do not like database connections due to their stateless nature. See here and here as examples of problems of database connections inside serverless functions.

It is a common need to restrict access to your website to some specific IPs. In this post, I will show how to implement an IP Allow/Deny list using Edge computing. Let me first introduce Cloudflare Workers.

Cloudflare Workers​

Cloudflare workers are quite popular technology in recent years. It became publicly available in 2017 and Cloudflare KV storage became publicly available in 2019.