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Browser Functions: A serverless platform using Web Browser execution engines

20 points| richardyoung00 | 6 years ago |dev.to

9 comments

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ksec|6 years ago

Wouldn't it be very memory inefficient? A browser "tab" isn't exactly a small amount of resource. And I remember there were quite a few problems with headless browser not being perfect ( Although I think that was quite a while ago so things might have improved )

However I do love the idea of Browser Function! It has been a long time since I have been excited with any Web Development tech. So I just need some time to sink in my excitement.

richardyoung00|6 years ago

Chrome seems to handle memory quite well in headless mode at any rate. The memory footprint isn't tiny, but it seems a fair bit smaller than the container based approaches used by other serverless systems.

Sonata|6 years ago

This sounds similar to how Cloudflare Workers work - using the V8 isolate technology built for Chrome to provide secure isolation of backend processes without the overhead of VMs or even containers.

jgrahamc|6 years ago

Yes. This is something like Cloudflare Workers (except we built a deep embedding of V8 rather than relying on the browser infrastructure).

https://workers.cloudflare.com/

Plus we have a distributed KV store to go with the code execution environment.

reticulation|6 years ago

What a brilliant idea... almost a Why Didn't I Think of That Idea!