serverless-wsgi VS gunicorn

I hope your head is not spinning. Now you might think, Wait, I have a Flask or my Django app where the framework is taking care of the endpoints in my python code. Do I need to recreate several lambdas? A valid question. Luckily, there is also an awesome Plugin for that.

> But two years from now CloudFlare could be doing the exact same stuff Amazon is doing now, and customers are locked in again, because no source code.

I hear this argument often but it always rings hollow.

A friend had a first gen iPod – when he wanted to switch, he discovered that the music he bought on iTunes couldn't be moved anywhere else because of DRM. That's lock in.

But this morning I was looking at the source code of an app built against the Serverless framework[1] and what I'm seeing is a bog standard WSGI application that uses a library to transform the inbound AWS "proprietary bits" into WSGI[2]. I'm not worried about lock-in there because all API Gateway + Lambda do is "translate an HTTP request into a JSON object and toss it to an app"[3] – what source code am I missing? The underlying Lambda/APIGW code? OK, but do I need it to run it myself? Not really.

Many – most? – AWS products tend towards this analysis. S3 is so locked in that, what, we now have multiple very high quality alternatives that are API compatible?

The real risk of cloud vendor lock in, from where I sit, comes from egregious pricing models that make it cheap to get data in & expensive to push data out. But I'm not sure Cloudflare has the juice to make this play work: egress pricing is essentially free money for AWS, so they've got lots of room to cut costs there – from what I've heard from people who negotiate real bills with AWS, they're very happy to give you discounts there.

[1]: https://github.com/serverless/examples/tree/master/aws-pytho...

[2]: https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi

[3]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide...

using https://github.com/logandk/serverless-wsgi

I'm hoping so – gunicorn has a long-open pull request that would fix `--reuse-port`, which currently does nothing

https://github.com/benoitc/gunicorn/pull/2938

However, I'm curious about the best way to deploy, specifically with regard to WSGI. I've tried using the raw eventlet WSGI server (`eventlet.wsgi.server(eventlet.listen(("", 8000)), application)`). I then start it with `python manage.py runserver`. This has worked okay, but I'm unsure about how scalable it is. It seems like the standard stack is Django + Gunicorn + NGINX. Based on `python-socketio` documentation, this should be possible. I tried django + eventlet + gunicorn, but it seems like gunicorn a) [doesn't play nice with eventlet](https://github.com/benoitc/gunicorn/pull/2581) and b) only supports one worker. Gevent + Gunicorn doesn't have this bug, but still only supports one worker. Also, I'm not sure how actively maintained gevent is. So I'm not sure how scalable either Gunicorn + eventlet or Gunicorn + geventlet is as a WSGI server. So I'm not sure if Gunicorn is my best bet, or if it's too limited.

For building your API, I recommend using the Flask library. It is very beginner-friendly, and you will be able to build a simple API in a matter of minutes! Keep in mind that, for a more serious project, you should definitely use something like gunicorn to run you API as a production server.

Interesting looks like it might actually be a python bug. Somehow just changing from sys.exit(0) -> os._exit(0) apparently fixes it.

https://github.com/benoitc/gunicorn/pull/2820

The cool thing is that you can easily migrate your WSGI- application such as Flask, Django, or Gunicorn to AWS.

Yeah, that's kind of the impression I was getting. I stumbled across a github issue for gunicorn along these lines.

Taking a glimpse at gunicorn's code it looks like they pretty much all do the same: 2. seems to be creating a wsgi app using django's internals, and 3. uses 2.