serverless-wsgi VS solid

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

This doesn't support the various consumer cloud storage APIs, but you've just reminded me of a project I ran into years ago that seems to still be around: https://remotestorage.io/

There's also Solid which attempts to do something similar: https://solidproject.org/

It is surprising to me this is not talked about more. I see little to none online news, podcasts, YouTube videos or anything else where this is discussed. I only found out about it because of research I did on Tim Berners-Lee in preparation for a Career Day talk at my kids middle school. Otherwise I would have probably not known about it still today. And even after I found out and started watching YouTube videos on the topic, YouTube won't even suggest any related videos about it even after already watching multiple videos on the subject (Web 3.0, Solid Project, Decentralized Web...etc).. is Big Tech trying to keep the web from evolving into what Sir Tim Berners-Lee is proposing?

It's only an unreasonable amount of work if you assume that the user is managing a separate storage backend for each library. If you take the Tim Berners-Lee approach (re: https://solidproject.org/) then each user is only managing one storage backend: the one that stores their data. The marginal cost of hooking in one more library low.

We just have to get a little more fed up with all of these services and then the initial cost of setting it up in the first place will be worth it. Any day now...

Solid is a web native protocol to enable interoperable, read-write, collaborative, and decentralized web, truer to web's original vision.

Manas project(https://github.com/manomayam/manas/tree/main) aims to create a modular framework and ecosystem to create correct, robust storage servers adhering to Solid protocol in rust.

[Solid](https://solidproject.org/) is a web native protocol to enable interoperable, read-write, collaborative, and decentralized web, truer to web's original vision.

    Solid adds to existing Web standards to realise a space where individuals can maintain their autonomy, control their data and privacy, and choose applications and services to fulfil their needs.

You're describing Solid, not the Semantic Web. Granted, Solid uses Semantic technologies to achieve it. https://solidproject.org/

Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project is working on that. Put data in "pods" that are stored on pod servers, which are federated. You can self-host.

It could be a federated layer of identity & personal content decoupled from social platforms.

https://solidproject.org/

Check out https://solidproject.org (If you want a short intro I recently gave a ~30min talk about it: https://noeldemartin.com/fosdem)