Show HN: Sick of running random cron jobs, I built a small Keepalive for my FaaS
stayingalive.vessels.techIf you need to keep your function "warm," why are you using FaaS in the first place? This almost seems like serverless satire!
I don’t understand this either. What’s the point of going serverless with something like Lambda if you’re treating it like a regular old EC2 instance with more overhead? Is it cheaper or something?
I'm pretty sure the "point" is "I drank the koolaid. Turns out I have diabetes and can't have that much sugar but fuck it insulin injections work so pass the koolaid bro"
I'm afraid I don't understand the purpose of this. Are there servers that die if you don't hit their URLs periodically? I use uptimerobot for my servers but it serves a different purpose.
For FaaS (like Lambda), if a function hasn't been hit in a while, it'll be cold started when it is needed next. (Even though it's "serverless" behind the scenes they're likely containers that stay up for a little while to handle subsequent requests; a cold start means there's overhead of starting up the container)
A hack to keep your function warm is to call it via cron or a service like this.
404 and invalid cert :-/
I get it. Well done!
I had the same problem when I first launched https://dndemail.com. Traffic was low and if no one uses the service for an hour or so, the first load in the app was slow.
I built a once a minute Cron to keep the app warm and initial requests quick.
Now I have enough traffic that I don't worry about the problem.
Why once a minute?