[ANN] PharoLambda a demo of Pharo running on AWS Lambda

Impressive stuff!! 

Alexandre

-- 
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Alexandre Bergel  http://www.bergel.eu
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On Aug 10, 2017, at 9:47 AM, Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

I just wanted to thank everyone for their help in getting my pet project further along, so that now I can announce that PharoLambda is now working with the V7 minimal image and also supports post mortem debugging by saving a zipped fuel context onto S3.

This latter item is particularly satisfying as at a recent serverless conference (JeffConf) there was a panel where poor development tools on serverless platforms was highlighted as a real problem.

In our community we’ve had these kinds of tools at our fingertips for ages - but I don’t think the wider development community has really noticed. Debugging something short lived like a Lambda execution is quite startling, as the current answer is “add more logging”, and we all know that sucks. To this end, I’ve created a little screencast showing this in action - and it was pretty cool because it was a real example I encountered when I got everything working and was trying my test application out.

I’ve also put a bit of work into tuning the excellent GitLab CI tools, so that I can cache many of the artefacts used between different build runs (this might also be of interest to others using CI systems).

The Gitlab project is on: https://gitlab.com/macta/PharoLambda

And the screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNNCT1hLA3E

Tim

On 15 Jul 2017, at 00:39, Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi - I’ve been playing around with getting Pharo to run well on AWS Lambda. It’s early days, but I though it might be interesting to share what I’ve learned so far.

Usage examples and code at https://gitlab.com/macta/PharoLambda

With help from many of the folks here, I’ve been able to get a simple example to run in 500ms-1200ms with a minimal Pharo 6 image. You can easily try it out yourself. This seems slightly better than what the GoLang folks have been able to do.

Tim

I just wanted to thank everyone for their help in getting my pet project further along, so that now I can announce that PharoLambda is now working with the V7 minimal image and also supports post mortem debugging by saving a zipped fuel context onto S3.

This latter item is particularly satisfying as at a recent serverless conference (JeffConf) there was a panel where poor development tools on serverless platforms was highlighted as a real problem.

In our community we’ve had these kinds of tools at our fingertips for ages - but I don’t think the wider development community has really noticed. Debugging something short lived like a Lambda execution is quite startling, as the current answer is “add more logging”, and we all know that sucks. To this end, I’ve created a little screencast showing this in action - and it was pretty cool because it was a real example I encountered when I got everything working and was trying my test application out.

I’ve also put a bit of work into tuning the excellent GitLab CI tools, so that I can cache many of the artefacts used between different build runs (this might also be of interest to others using CI systems).

The Gitlab project is on: https://gitlab.com/macta/PharoLambda

And the screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNNCT1hLA3E

Tim

On 15 Jul 2017, at 00:39, Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi - I’ve been playing around with getting Pharo to run well on AWS Lambda. It’s early days, but I though it might be interesting to share what I’ve learned so far.

Usage examples and code at https://gitlab.com/macta/PharoLambda

With help from many of the folks here, I’ve been able to get a simple example to run in 500ms-1200ms with a minimal Pharo 6 image. You can easily try it out yourself. This seems slightly better than what the GoLang folks have been able to do.

Tim

This is cool Tim.

So what image size you deployed at the end?

2017-08-10 15:47 GMT+02:00 Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]>:

I just wanted to thank everyone for their help in getting my pet project further along, so that now I can announce that PharoLambda is now working with the V7 minimal image and also supports post mortem debugging by saving a zipped fuel context onto S3.

This latter item is particularly satisfying as at a recent serverless conference (JeffConf) there was a panel where poor development tools on serverless platforms was highlighted as a real problem.

In our community we’ve had these kinds of tools at our fingertips for ages - but I don’t think the wider development community has really noticed. Debugging something short lived like a Lambda execution is quite startling, as the current answer is “add more logging”, and we all know that sucks. To this end, I’ve created a little screencast showing this in action - and it was pretty cool because it was a real example I encountered when I got everything working and was trying my test application out.

I’ve also put a bit of work into tuning the excellent GitLab CI tools, so that I can cache many of the artefacts used between different build runs (this might also be of interest to others using CI systems).

The Gitlab project is on: https://gitlab.com/macta/PharoLambda

And the screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNNCT1hLA3E

Tim

On 15 Jul 2017, at 00:39, Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi - I’ve been playing around with getting Pharo to run well on AWS Lambda. It’s early days, but I though it might be interesting to share what I’ve learned so far.

Usage examples and code at https://gitlab.com/macta/PharoLambda

With help from many of the folks here, I’ve been able to get a simple example to run in 500ms-1200ms with a minimal Pharo 6 image. You can easily try it out yourself. This seems slightly better than what the GoLang folks have been able to do.

Tim

Hi Tim,

On Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 11:41 AM, Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hey guys, thanks for your enthusiasm around this - and I cannot stress enough how this was only possible because of the work that has gone into making Pharo (in particular the 64bit image, as well as having a minimal image, and some great blog posts on serialising contexts) as well as the patience from everyone in answering questions and helping me get it all working.

I’m still quite keen to get my execution time back down under 800ms and I’d like to actually get back to writing a few skills to automate a few things around my house.

To Answer Denis’ question - 

My final footprint is 30.4mb - thats composed of a 22mb image (with a simple example that pulls in Fuel, ZTimestamp and the S3 Library which depends on XMLParser) and then the VM (from which I removed obvious dll’s).

In my original experiments with a 6.0 minimal image - I did manage to get to a 13.4mb image (which started out as 12mb original size, and then loaded in STON and had only a simple clock example). I think the sweet spot is around 20mb total footprint as that seems to get me into the 450ms-900ms range.

The 7.0 min image now starts out at 15mb and then I’m not sure why loading Fuel, S3 and XMLParser takes 7mb (it seems big to me - but I’ve not dug into that).

You can do further space analysis using the following expression

SpaceTally  new printSpaceAnalysis

You can do that in an eval and check what's taking space. With measures we can iterate and improve :).

 

I’ve also found (and this on the back of unserialising the context in my example) that the way we build images has 15+ saved stack sessions that have saved on top of each other from the way we build up the images. I don’t yet know the implications of size/speed of these - but we need a better way of folding executions when we snapshot headless images. I’m also not clear if there are any other startup tasks that take precious time (this also has implications for our fat development images as they take much longer to appear than they really should).

I'm working on this as I'm writing this mail ;)

https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20309

https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/196 

I'll write down the implications further in a different thread.

I’ll be exploring some of these size/speed tradeoff’s in follow on messages.

But once again, a big thanks - I’ve not enjoyed programming like this for ages.

Tim

On 12 Aug 2017, at 16:26, Ben Coman <[hidden email]> wrote:

hi Tim,  

That is.....      AWESOME!

Very nice delivery - it flowed well with great narration. 

I loved @2:17 "this is the interesting piece, because PharoLambda has serialized the execution context of its application and saved it into [my S3 bucket] ... [then on the local machine] rematerializes a debugger [on that context]."

There is a clarity in your video presentation that really may intrigue outsiders. As a community we should push this on the usual hacker forums - ycombinator could be a good starting point (but I'm locked out of my account there).  

An enticing title could be...

"Debugging Lambdas by re-materializing saved execution contexts on your local machine."

cheers -ben

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 3:37 PM, Denis Kudriashov <[hidden email]> wrote:

This is cool Tim.

So what image size you deployed at the end?

2017-08-10 15:47 GMT+02:00 Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]>:

I just wanted to thank everyone for their help in getting my pet project further along, so that now I can announce that PharoLambda is now working with the V7 minimal image and also supports post mortem debugging by saving a zipped fuel context onto S3.

This latter item is particularly satisfying as at a recent serverless conference (JeffConf) there was a panel where poor development tools on serverless platforms was highlighted as a real problem.

In our community we’ve had these kinds of tools at our fingertips for ages - but I don’t think the wider development community has really noticed. Debugging something short lived like a Lambda execution is quite startling, as the current answer is “add more logging”, and we all know that sucks. To this end, I’ve created a little screencast showing this in action - and it was pretty cool because it was a real example I encountered when I got everything working and was trying my test application out.

I’ve also put a bit of work into tuning the excellent GitLab CI tools, so that I can cache many of the artefacts used between different build runs (this might also be of interest to others using CI systems).

The Gitlab project is on: https://gitlab.com/macta/PharoLambda

And the screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNNCT1hLA3E

Tim

On 15 Jul 2017, at 00:39, Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi - I’ve been playing around with getting Pharo to run well on AWS Lambda. It’s early days, but I though it might be interesting to share what I’ve learned so far.

Usage examples and code at https://gitlab.com/macta/PharoLambda

With help from many of the folks here, I’ve been able to get a simple example to run in 500ms-1200ms with a minimal Pharo 6 image. You can easily try it out yourself. This seems slightly better than what the GoLang folks have been able to do.

Tim

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