> How could a developer understand how many requests per container to set
James, this is a good point, along with the other points in your email. I think the developer doesn't need to know this info actually. What stops Openwhisk to be smart in observing the response times, CPU consumption, memory consumption of the running containers ? Doing so it could learn automatically how many concurrent requests 1 action can handle. It might be easier to solve this problem efficiently, instead of the other problem which pushes the entire system to its limits when a couple of actions get a lot of traffic. On Mon, Jul 3, 2017 at 10:08 AM James Thomas <jthomas...@gmail.com> wrote: > +1 on Markus' points about "crash safety" and "scaling". I can understand > the reasons behind exploring this change but from a developer experience > point of view this adds introduces a large amount of complexity to the > programming model. > > If I have a concurrent container serving 100 requests and one of the > requests triggers a fatal error how does that affect the other requests? > Tearing down the entire runtime environment will destroy all those > requests. > > How could a developer understand how many requests per container to set > without a manual trial and error process? It also means you have to start > considering things like race conditions or other challenges of concurrent > code execution. This makes debugging and monitoring also more challenging. > > Looking at the other serverless providers, I've not seen this featured > requested before. Developers generally ask AWS to raise the concurrent > invocations limit for their application. This keeps the platform doing the > hard task of managing resources and being efficient and allows them to use > the same programming model. > > On 2 July 2017 at 11:05, Markus Thömmes <markusthoem...@me.com> wrote: > > > ... > > > > > > To Rodric's points I think there are two topics to speak about and discuss: > > > > 1. The programming model: The current model encourages users to break > > their actions apart in "functions" that take payload and return payload. > > Having a deployment model outlined could as noted encourage users to use > > OpenWhisk as a way to rapidly deploy/undeploy their usual webserver based > > applications. The current model is nice in that it solves a lot of > problems > > for the customer in terms of scalability and "crash safeness". > > > > 2. Raw throughput of our deployment model: Setting the concerns aside I > > think it is valid to explore concurrent invocations of actions on the > same > > container. This does not necessarily mean that users start to deploy > > monolithic apps as noted above, but it certainly could. Keeping our > > JSON-in/JSON-out at least for now though, could encourage users to > continue > > to think in functions. Having a toggle per action which is disabled by > > default might be a good way to start here, since many users might need to > > change action code to support that notion and for some applications it > > might not be valid at all. I think it was also already noted, that this > > imposes some of the "old-fashioned" problems on the user, like: How many > > concurrent requests will my action be able to handle? That kinda defeats > > the seemless-scalability point of serverless. > > > > Cheers, > > Markus > > > > > -- > Regards, > James Thomas >