Peter Kraft

Nov 20, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | Qian Li |Peter Kraft |Karen Emslie |Logan Kugler

Serverless cloud offerings are becoming increasingly popular for stateless applications because they simplify cloud deployment. This article argues that if serverless platforms could wrap functions in database transactions, they would also be a good fit for database-backed applications. There are two unique benefits of such a transactional serverless platform: time-travel debugging of past events and reliable program execution with “exactly-once” semantics.

Oct 6, 2024 | dev.to | Peter Kraft

Want to process incoming events exactly-once? Well, any distributed systems pedant will say you can't, because it's theoretically impossible. And technically, they're right: if you send a message and don't get an answer, you have no way of knowing whether the receiver is offline or just slow, so eventually you have no choice but to send the message again if you want it processed. So if exactly-once processing is impossible, why do many systems, including DBOS, claim to provide it?

Sep 12, 2024 | cell.com | Peter Kraft

1Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA 2Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA 3Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA 4Institute of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway 5Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program, National Cancer Institute, Rockville, MD, USA 6Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics,...

Jun 17, 2024 | dbos.dev | Peter Kraft

Increasingly, developers are using reliable workflows to help build applications. Reliable workflows are programs that always run to completion–if they’re interrupted, they automatically resume from where they left off. They make it much easier to write complex stateful programs, such as for payment processing, user onboarding, or exactly-once event processing. Popular reliable workflow platforms, like AWS Step Functions, work via external orchestration.

Jun 12, 2024 | dev.to | Peter Kraft

We’ve often heard developers working on stateful applications say that they want to adopt serverless technology to more easily deploy to the cloud, but can’t because it’s prohibitively expensive. For clarity, by “stateful applications” we mean applications that manage persistent state stored in a database (for example, a web app built on Postgres). In this blog post, we'll show how to make serverless 15x cheaper for stateful applications. First, we'll explain why it's too expensive right now.