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  5. Serverless vs Sidekiq

Serverless vs Sidekiq

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Sidekiq
Sidekiq
Stacks1.2K
Followers632
Votes408
Serverless
Serverless
Stacks2.2K
Followers1.2K
Votes28
GitHub Stars46.9K
Forks5.7K

Serverless vs Sidekiq: What are the differences?

What is Serverless? The most widely-adopted toolkit for building serverless applications. 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.

What is Sidekiq? Simple, efficient background processing for Ruby. Sidekiq uses threads to handle many jobs at the same time in the same process. It does not require Rails but will integrate tightly with Rails 3/4 to make background processing dead simple.

Serverless can be classified as a tool in the "Serverless / Task Processing" category, while Sidekiq is grouped under "Background Processing".

"API integration " is the primary reason why developers consider Serverless over the competitors, whereas "Simple" was stated as the key factor in picking Sidekiq.

Serverless and Sidekiq are both open source tools. Serverless with 30.9K GitHub stars and 3.43K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Sidekiq with 9.68K GitHub stars and 1.66K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Sidekiq has a broader approval, being mentioned in 348 company stacks & 77 developers stacks; compared to Serverless, which is listed in 117 company stacks and 44 developer stacks.

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Advice on Sidekiq, Serverless

Tim
Tim

CTO at Checkly Inc.

Sep 18, 2019

Needs adviceonHerokuHerokuAWS LambdaAWS Lambda

When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:

  • Developer Experience trumps everything.
  • AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
  • If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.

The setup

Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:

  • Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
  • Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
  • Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
  • Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
  • Heroku
  • Lambda

It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?

I chopped that question up into the following categories:

  • Developer Experience / DX 🤓
  • Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
  • Cost 💵
  • Lock in 🔐

Read the full post linked below for all details

357k views357k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Sidekiq
Sidekiq
Serverless
Serverless

Sidekiq uses threads to handle many jobs at the same time in the same process. It does not require Rails but will integrate tightly with Rails 3/4 to make background processing dead simple.

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.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
46.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
5.7K
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
2.2K
Followers
632
Followers
1.2K
Votes
408
Votes
28
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 124
    Simple
  • 99
    Efficient background processing
  • 60
    Scalability
  • 37
    Better then resque
  • 26
    Great documentation
Pros
  • 14
    API integration
  • 7
    Supports cloud functions for Google, Azure, and IBM
  • 3
    Lower cost
  • 1
    Openwhisk
  • 1
    Auto scale
Integrations
No integrations available
Azure Functions
Azure Functions
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway

What are some alternatives to Sidekiq, Serverless?

AWS Lambda

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.

Beanstalkd

Beanstalkd

Beanstalks's interface is generic, but was originally designed for reducing the latency of page views in high-volume web applications by running time-consuming tasks asynchronously.

Azure Functions

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 Run

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.

Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions

Construct applications from bite-sized business logic billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds, only while your code is running

Knative

Knative

Knative provides a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center

Hangfire

Hangfire

It is an open-source framework that helps you to create, process and manage your background jobs, i.e. operations you don't want to put in your request processing pipeline. It supports all kind of background tasks – short-running and long-running, CPU intensive and I/O intensive, one shot and recurrent.

OpenFaaS

OpenFaaS

Serverless Functions Made Simple for Docker and Kubernetes

Nuclio

Nuclio

nuclio is portable across IoT devices, laptops, on-premises datacenters and cloud deployments, eliminating cloud lock-ins and enabling hybrid solutions.

Resque

Resque

Background jobs can be any Ruby class or module that responds to perform. Your existing classes can easily be converted to background jobs or you can create new classes specifically to do work. Or, you can do both.

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