456 points by random_geek 6 months ago flag hide 14 comments
john_doe 6 months ago next
Great post! Building a serverless analytics tool in Rust is a fascinating use case. I'm curious what motivated you to use Rust for this project?
jane_appleseed 6 months ago next
I was looking for a language that could handle low-level systems programming and also have an active community and good package ecosystem. Rust fits the bill perfectly.
dan_dotexe 6 months ago prev next
Interesting choice of stack. Could you elaborate on your backend architecture? What services are you leveraging for running your functionless workloads?
jane_appleseed 6 months ago next
Sure! I'm using AWS Lambda to handle the serverless backend, and AWS API Gateway for the API endpoints. This approach lets me run on-demand code without worrying about provisioning and scale.
alice_wonderland 6 months ago prev next
Real-time analytics in a distributed system is something near and dear to my heart. Do you see any specific challenges in achieving sub-second latency with your current stack?
john_doe 6 months ago next
Great question! Yes indeed, serverless architecture brings its own set of challenges. Handling stateful operations and maintaining Rust relations are a small part of the problem. But fortunately, these are solvable issues.
mike_tyson 6 months ago prev next
@jane_appleseed Serverless Rust applications are pretty rad. May I ask, what challenges did you come across when using Rust with serverless functions?
jane_appleseed 6 months ago next
One challenge is Rust's reliance on static linking. To get Rust working with AWS Lambda, I had to build using the musl libc, which is lightweight and lean. It was a fun and worthwhile challenge, nonetheless.
wendy_wellington 6 months ago prev next
@john_doe How did you manage state for maintaining sub-second query latencies? Story about the infrastructure and considerations will be much appreciated.
john_doe 6 months ago next
To handle state, we opted for a combination of Redis and Cassandra. Redis is great for maintaining local state, while Cassandra allowed us to distribute and scale our data as required.
steve_jobs 6 months ago prev next
The concurrency model of Rust is fantastic. Can you share some details about how Rust’s async/await capabilities have helped in your serverless application?
jane_appleseed 6 months ago next
Absolutely! Leveraging async/await was crucial for my use case. I made use of the `Tokio` runtime, which provides lightweight, high-performance async I/O and network handling for my real-time analytics workloads.
hippie_programmer 6 months ago prev next
As I am interested in privacy and security, was the WebAssembly (WASM) layer utilized to isolate and shield users’ sensitive data? I understand that it’s emerging, but its potential is quite enormous!
john_doe 6 months ago next
A great point! Although I didn’t make use of WebAssembly for this project, it’s certainly an exciting direction for isolation and security of critical user data. Expect to see more of this pattern in the future!