What is Apex and what are its top alternatives?
Apex is a serverless platform that allows users to build, deploy, and manage AWS Lambda functions with ease. It provides a simple way to deploy code to AWS Lambda without the need for complex configurations. However, Apex has limitations such as lack of support for multiple runtimes and limited debugging capabilities.
Serverless Framework: Serverless Framework is a popular open-source tool for building serverless applications across different cloud platforms. It supports multiple runtimes, has a vibrant community, and offers extensive plugin support. However, it can be complex for beginners.
Terraform: Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that allows users to define and provision cloud infrastructure in a declarative configuration language. It supports multiple cloud providers and offers robust state management. However, it has a steeper learning curve compared to Apex.
AWS SAM: AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) is an extension of AWS CloudFormation that simplifies building serverless applications on AWS. It integrates seamlessly with AWS services, offers local debugging, and has an easy-to-use CLI. However, it is limited to the AWS ecosystem.
Google Cloud Functions: Google Cloud Functions is Google's serverless compute platform that allows users to run code in response to events. It seamlessly integrates with other GCP services, offers auto-scaling, and supports multiple runtimes. However, it is limited to the Google Cloud platform.
Azure Functions: Azure Functions is Microsoft's serverless compute service that enables users to run event-driven code without managing infrastructure. It provides seamless integration with Azure services, supports multiple languages, and offers pay-as-you-go pricing. However, it is limited to the Azure ecosystem.
Kubeless: Kubeless is a Kubernetes-native serverless framework that allows users to deploy functions on Kubernetes clusters. It supports multiple runtimes, offers HTTP triggers, and provides scaling based on resource usage. However, it requires knowledge of Kubernetes for deployment.
OpenFaaS: OpenFaaS is an open-source serverless platform that runs on Kubernetes and Docker. It offers fast cold starts, supports multiple languages, and provides an active community for support and development. However, it requires a Kubernetes cluster for deployment.
Nuclio: Nuclio is a serverless framework that focuses on high-performance event and data processing. It offers support for IoT and real-time workloads, provides seamless integration with data sources, and supports GPU acceleration. However, it may be overkill for simple functions.
Fission: Fission is a Kubernetes-native serverless framework that simplifies the deployment of functions on Kubernetes clusters. It offers multi-tenancy support, seamless scaling, and automatic garbage collection. However, it may require more configuration compared to Apex.
IBM Cloud Functions: IBM Cloud Functions is IBM's serverless platform that enables users to execute code in response to events. It offers seamless integration with IBM Cloud services, supports multiple runtimes, and provides logging and monitoring capabilities. However, it is limited to the IBM Cloud platform.
Top Alternatives to Apex
- Java
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere! ...
- AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security. ...
- Serverless
Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more. ...
- Azure Functions
Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems. ...
- Google Cloud Functions
Construct applications from bite-sized business logic billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds, only while your code is running ...
- Cloud Functions for Firebase
Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you create functions that are triggered by Firebase products, such as changes to data in the Realtime Database, uploads to Cloud Storage, new user sign ups via Authentication, and conversion events in Analytics. ...
- Google Cloud Run
A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management. ...
- Cloudflare Workers
Build serverless applications on Cloudflare's global cloud network of 165 data centers. It provides a lightweight JavaScript execution environment that allows developers to augment existing applications or create entirely new ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. ...
Apex alternatives & related posts
Java
- Great libraries599
- Widely used445
- Excellent tooling400
- Huge amount of documentation available395
- Large pool of developers available334
- Open source208
- Excellent performance202
- Great development157
- Used for android150
- Vast array of 3rd party libraries148
- Compiled Language60
- Used for Web52
- High Performance46
- Managed memory46
- Native threads44
- Statically typed43
- Easy to read35
- Great Community33
- Reliable platform29
- Sturdy garbage collection24
- JVM compatibility24
- Cross Platform Enterprise Integration22
- Universal platform20
- Good amount of APIs20
- Great Support18
- Great ecosystem14
- Backward compatible11
- Lots of boilerplate11
- Everywhere10
- Excellent SDK - JDK9
- It's Java7
- Cross-platform7
- Static typing7
- Mature language thus stable systems6
- Better than Ruby6
- Long term language6
- Portability6
- Clojure5
- Vast Collections Library5
- Used for Android development5
- Most developers favorite4
- Old tech4
- History3
- Great Structure3
- Stable platform, which many new languages depend on3
- Javadoc3
- Testable3
- Best martial for design3
- Type Safe2
- Faster than python2
- Job0
- Verbosity33
- NullpointerException27
- Nightmare to Write17
- Overcomplexity is praised in community culture16
- Boiler plate code12
- Classpath hell prior to Java 98
- No REPL6
- No property4
- Code are too long3
- Non-intuitive generic implementation2
- There is not optional parameter2
- Floating-point errors2
- Java's too statically, stronglly, and strictly typed1
- Returning Wildcard Types1
- Terrbible compared to Python/Batch Perormence1
related Java posts
How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:
Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.
Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:
https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)
Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark
When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.
AWS Lambda
- No infrastructure129
- Cheap83
- Quick70
- Stateless59
- No deploy, no server, great sleep47
- AWS Lambda went down taking many sites with it12
- Event Driven Governance6
- Extensive API6
- Auto scale and cost effective6
- Easy to deploy6
- VPC Support5
- Integrated with various AWS services3
- Cant execute ruby or go7
- Compute time limited3
- Can't execute PHP w/o significant effort1
related AWS Lambda posts
Recently we were looking at a few robust and cost-effective ways of replicating the data that resides in our production MongoDB to a PostgreSQL database for data warehousing and business intelligence.
We set ourselves the following criteria for the optimal tool that would do this job: - The data replication must be near real-time, yet it should NOT impact the production database - The data replication must be horizontally scalable (based on the load), asynchronous & crash-resilient
Based on the above criteria, we selected the following tools to perform the end to end data replication:
We chose MongoDB Stitch for picking up the changes in the source database. It is the serverless platform from MongoDB. One of the services offered by MongoDB Stitch is Stitch Triggers. Using stitch triggers, you can execute a serverless function (in Node.js) in real time in response to changes in the database. When there are a lot of database changes, Stitch automatically "feeds forward" these changes through an asynchronous queue.
We chose Amazon SQS as the pipe / message backbone for communicating the changes from MongoDB to our own replication service. Interestingly enough, MongoDB stitch offers integration with AWS services.
In the Node.js function, we wrote minimal functionality to communicate the database changes (insert / update / delete / replace) to Amazon SQS.
Next we wrote a minimal micro-service in Python to listen to the message events on SQS, pickup the data payload & mirror the DB changes on to the target Data warehouse. We implemented source data to target data translation by modelling target table structures through SQLAlchemy . We deployed this micro-service as AWS Lambda with Zappa. With Zappa, deploying your services as event-driven & horizontally scalable Lambda service is dumb-easy.
In the end, we got to implement a highly scalable near realtime Change Data Replication service that "works" and deployed to production in a matter of few days!
Heroku Docker GitHub Node.js hapi Vue.js AWS Lambda Amazon S3 PostgreSQL Knex.js Checkly is a fairly young company and we're still working hard to find the correct mix of product features, price and audience.
We are focussed on tech B2B, but I always wanted to serve solo developers too. So I decided to make a $7 plan.
Why $7? Simply put, it seems to be a sweet spot for tech companies: Heroku, Docker, Github, Appoptics (Librato) all offer $7 plans. They must have done a ton of research into this, so why not piggy back that and try it out.
Enough biz talk, onto tech. The challenges were:
- Slice of a portion of the functionality so a $7 plan is still profitable. We call this the "plan limits"
- Update API and back end services to handle and enforce plan limits.
- Update the UI to kindly state plan limits are in effect on some part of the UI.
- Update the pricing page to reflect all changes.
- Keep the actual processing backend, storage and API's as untouched as possible.
In essence, we went from strictly volume based pricing to value based pricing. Here come the technical steps & decisions we made to get there.
- We updated our PostgreSQL schema so plans now have an array of "features". These are string constants that represent feature toggles.
- The Vue.js frontend reads these from the vuex store on login.
- Based on these values, the UI has simple
v-if
statements to either just show the feature or show a friendly "please upgrade" button. - The hapi API has a hook on each relevant API endpoint that checks whether a user's plan has the feature enabled, or not.
Side note: We offer 10 SMS messages per month on the developer plan. However, we were not actually counting how many people were sending. We had to update our alerting daemon (that runs on Heroku and triggers SMS messages via AWS SNS) to actually bump a counter.
What we build is basically feature-toggling based on plan features. It is very extensible for future additions. Our scheduling and storage backend that actually runs users' monitoring requests (AWS Lambda) and stores the results (S3 and Postgres) has no knowledge of all of this and remained unchanged.
Hope this helps anyone building out their SaaS and is in a similar situation.
Serverless
- API integration14
- Supports cloud functions for Google, Azure, and IBM7
- Lower cost3
- Auto scale1
- Openwhisk1
related Serverless posts
We are in the process of building a modern content platform to deliver our content through various channels. We decided to go with Microservices architecture as we wanted scale. Microservice architecture style is an approach to developing an application as a suite of small independently deployable services built around specific business capabilities. You can gain modularity, extensive parallelism and cost-effective scaling by deploying services across many distributed servers. Microservices modularity facilitates independent updates/deployments, and helps to avoid single point of failure, which can help prevent large-scale outages. We also decided to use Event Driven Architecture pattern which is a popular distributed asynchronous architecture pattern used to produce highly scalable applications. The event-driven architecture is made up of highly decoupled, single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events.
To build our #Backend capabilities we decided to use the following: 1. #Microservices - Java with Spring Boot , Node.js with ExpressJS and Python with Flask 2. #Eventsourcingframework - Amazon Kinesis , Amazon Kinesis Firehose , Amazon SNS , Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda 3. #Data - Amazon RDS , Amazon DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , MongoDB Atlas
To build #Webapps we decided to use Angular 2 with RxJS
#Devops - GitHub , Travis CI , Terraform , Docker , Serverless
At Epsagon, we use hundreds of AWS Lambda functions, most of them are written in Python, and the Serverless Framework to pack and deploy them. One of the issues we've encountered is the difficulty to package external libraries into the Lambda environment using the Serverless Framework. This limitation is probably by design since the external code your Lambda needs can be usually included with a package manager.
In order to overcome this issue, we've developed a tool, which we also published as open-source (see link below), which automatically packs these libraries using a simple npm package and a YAML configuration file. Support for Node.js, Go, and Java will be available soon.
The GitHub respoitory: https://github.com/epsagon/serverless-package-external
- Pay only when invoked14
- Great developer experience for C#11
- Multiple languages supported9
- Great debugging support7
- Can be used as lightweight https service5
- Easy scalability4
- WebHooks3
- Costo3
- Event driven2
- Azure component events for Storage, services etc2
- Poor developer experience for C#2
- No persistent (writable) file system available1
- Poor support for Linux environments1
- Sporadic server & language runtime issues1
- Not suited for long-running applications1
related Azure Functions posts
CodeFactor being a #SAAS product, our goal was to run on a cloud-native infrastructure since day one. We wanted to stay product focused, rather than having to work on the infrastructure that supports the application. We needed a cloud-hosting provider that would be reliable, economical and most efficient for our product.
CodeFactor.io aims to provide an automated and frictionless code review service for software developers. That requires agility, instant provisioning, autoscaling, security, availability and compliance management features. We looked at the top three #IAAS providers that take up the majority of market share: Amazon's Amazon EC2 , Microsoft's Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.
AWS has been available since 2006 and has developed the most extensive services ant tools variety at a massive scale. Azure and GCP are about half the AWS age, but also satisfied our technical requirements.
It is worth noting that even though all three providers support Docker containerization services, GCP has the most robust offering due to their investments in Kubernetes. Also, if you are a Microsoft shop, and develop in .NET - Visual Studio Azure shines at integration there and all your existing .NET code works seamlessly on Azure. All three providers have serverless computing offerings (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions). Additionally, all three providers have machine learning tools, but GCP appears to be the most developer-friendly, intuitive and complete when it comes to #Machinelearning and #AI.
The prices between providers are competitive across the board. For our requirements, AWS would have been the most expensive, GCP the least expensive and Azure was in the middle. Plus, if you #Autoscale frequently with large deltas, note that Azure and GCP have per minute billing, where AWS bills you per hour. We also applied for the #Startup programs with all three providers, and this is where Azure shined. While AWS and GCP for startups would have covered us for about one year of infrastructure costs, Azure Sponsorship would cover about two years of CodeFactor's hosting costs. Moreover, Azure Team was terrific - I felt that they wanted to work with us where for AWS and GCP we were just another startup.
In summary, we were leaning towards GCP. GCP's advantages in containerization, automation toolset, #Devops mindset, and pricing were the driving factors there. Nevertheless, we could not say no to Azure's financial incentives and a strong sense of partnership and support throughout the process.
Bottom line is, IAAS offerings with AWS, Azure, and GCP are evolving fast. At CodeFactor, we aim to be platform agnostic where it is practical and retain the flexibility to cherry-pick the best products across providers.
In a couple of recent projects we had an opportunity to try out the new Serverless approach to building web applications. It wasn't necessarily a question if we should use any particular vendor but rather "if" we can consider serverless a viable option for building apps. Obviously our goal was also to get a feel for this technology and gain some hands-on experience.
We did consider AWS Lambda, Firebase from Google as well as Azure Functions. Eventually we went with AWS Lambdas.
PROS- No servers to manage (obviously!)
- Limited fixed costs – you pay only for used time
- Automated scaling and balancing
- Automatic failover (or, at this level of abstraction, no failover problem at all)
- Security easier to provide and audit
- Low overhead at the start (with the certain level of knowledge)
- Short time to market
- Easy handover - deployment coupled with code
- Perfect choice for lean startups with fast-paced iterations
- Augmentation for the classic cloud, server(full) approach
- Not much know-how and best practices available about structuring the code and projects on the market
- Not suitable for complex business logic due to the risk of producing highly coupled code
- Cost difficult to estimate (helpful tools: serverlesscalc.com)
- Difficulty in migration to other platforms (Vendor lock⚠️)
- Little engineers with experience in serverless on the job market
- Steep learning curve for engineers without any cloud experience
More details are on our blog: https://evojam.com/blog/2018/12/5/should-you-go-serverless-meet-the-benefits-and-flaws-of-new-wave-of-cloud-solutions I hope it helps 🙌 & I'm curious of your experiences.
Google Cloud Functions
- Serverless Applications7
- Its not AWS5
- Simplicity4
- Free Tiers and Trainging3
- Simple config with GitLab CI/CD2
- Built-in Webhook trigger1
- Typescript Support1
- Blaze, pay as you go1
- Customer Support1
- Node.js only1
- Typescript Support0
- Blaze, pay as you go0
related Google Cloud Functions posts
CodeFactor being a #SAAS product, our goal was to run on a cloud-native infrastructure since day one. We wanted to stay product focused, rather than having to work on the infrastructure that supports the application. We needed a cloud-hosting provider that would be reliable, economical and most efficient for our product.
CodeFactor.io aims to provide an automated and frictionless code review service for software developers. That requires agility, instant provisioning, autoscaling, security, availability and compliance management features. We looked at the top three #IAAS providers that take up the majority of market share: Amazon's Amazon EC2 , Microsoft's Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.
AWS has been available since 2006 and has developed the most extensive services ant tools variety at a massive scale. Azure and GCP are about half the AWS age, but also satisfied our technical requirements.
It is worth noting that even though all three providers support Docker containerization services, GCP has the most robust offering due to their investments in Kubernetes. Also, if you are a Microsoft shop, and develop in .NET - Visual Studio Azure shines at integration there and all your existing .NET code works seamlessly on Azure. All three providers have serverless computing offerings (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions). Additionally, all three providers have machine learning tools, but GCP appears to be the most developer-friendly, intuitive and complete when it comes to #Machinelearning and #AI.
The prices between providers are competitive across the board. For our requirements, AWS would have been the most expensive, GCP the least expensive and Azure was in the middle. Plus, if you #Autoscale frequently with large deltas, note that Azure and GCP have per minute billing, where AWS bills you per hour. We also applied for the #Startup programs with all three providers, and this is where Azure shined. While AWS and GCP for startups would have covered us for about one year of infrastructure costs, Azure Sponsorship would cover about two years of CodeFactor's hosting costs. Moreover, Azure Team was terrific - I felt that they wanted to work with us where for AWS and GCP we were just another startup.
In summary, we were leaning towards GCP. GCP's advantages in containerization, automation toolset, #Devops mindset, and pricing were the driving factors there. Nevertheless, we could not say no to Azure's financial incentives and a strong sense of partnership and support throughout the process.
Bottom line is, IAAS offerings with AWS, Azure, and GCP are evolving fast. At CodeFactor, we aim to be platform agnostic where it is practical and retain the flexibility to cherry-pick the best products across providers.
AWS Lambda Serverless Amazon CloudWatch Azure Functions Google Cloud Functions Node.js
In the last year or so, I moved all Checkly monitoring workloads to AWS Lambda. Here are some stats:
- We run three core functions in all AWS regions. They handle API checks, browser checks and setup / teardown scripts. Check our docs to find out what that means.
- All functions are hooked up to SNS topics but can also be triggered directly through AWS SDK calls.
- The busiest function is a plumbing function that forwards data to our database. It is invoked anywhere between 7000 and 10.000 times per hour with an average duration of about 179 ms.
- We run separate dev and test versions of each function in each region.
Moving all this to AWS Lambda took some work and considerations. The blog post linked below goes into the following topics:
- Why Lambda is an almost perfect match for SaaS. Especially when you're small.
- Why I don't use a "big" framework around it.
- Why distributed background jobs triggered by queues are Lambda's raison d'être.
- Why monitoring & logging is still an issue.
https://blog.checklyhq.com/how-i-made-aws-lambda-work-for-my-saas/
- Up and running4
- Multi-region1
- Affordable1
related Cloud Functions for Firebase posts
For inboxkitten.com, an opensource disposable email service;
We migrated our serverless workload from Cloud Functions for Firebase to CloudFlare workers, taking advantage of the lower cost and faster-performing edge computing of Cloudflare network. Made possible due to our extremely low CPU and RAM overhead of our serverless functions.
If I were to summarize the limitation of Cloudflare (as oppose to firebase/gcp functions), it would be ...
- <5ms CPU time limit
- Incompatible with express.js
- one script limitation per domain
Limitations our workload is able to conform with (YMMV)
For hosting of static files, we migrated from Firebase to CommonsHost
More details on the trade-off in between both serverless providers is in the article
In #Aliadoc, we're exploring the crowdfunding option to get traction before launch. We are building a SaaS platform for website design customization.
For the Admin UI and website editor we use React and we're currently transitioning from a Create React App setup to a custom one because our needs have become more specific. We use CloudFlare as much as possible, it's a great service.
For routing dynamic resources and proxy tasks to feed websites to the editor we leverage CloudFlare Workers for improved responsiveness. We use Firebase for our hosting needs and user authentication while also using several Cloud Functions for Firebase to interact with other services along with Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage, but also the Real Time Database is on the radar for collaborative website editing.
We generally hate configuration but honestly because of the stage of our project we lack resources for doing heavy sysops work. So we are basically just relying on Serverless technologies as much as we can to do all server side processing.
Visual Studio Code definitively makes programming a much easier and enjoyable task, we just love it. We combine it with Bitbucket for our source code control needs.
Google Cloud Run
- HTTPS endpoints11
- Fully managed10
- Pay per use10
- Concurrency: multiple requests sent to each container7
- Deploy containers7
- Serverless7
- Custom domains with auto SSL6
- "Invoke IAM permission" to manage authentication4
- Cons0
related Google Cloud Run posts
I use Google Cloud Run because it's like bring your own docker image to Google Cloud Functions.
I use it for building Dash Apps
It creates a nice url for web apps, and I see it being the evolution of serverless if GCP can scale this up.
What are the best options to host a Spring Boot application that acts as a receiver and publisher from Google Cloud Pub/Sub. I am using Google App Engine to do that, but there is Google Cloud Dataflow and Google Cloud Run that can be used. Which is the best option that can be used for this purpose and also that can handle the failover scenarios as well. Thanks!