LYRID
By: Handoyo Sutanto
Tags: Startup, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Web Development, Serverless

Firstly…What is Lyrid?

We are a collection of tools and frameworks that are put together as a SaaS platform. You will be able to use these to help build your cloud-native serverless application that can run on multiple, serverless public cloud platforms (such as AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Run).

Lyrid is first and foremost a platform provider for anyone to run their application servers. We create a seamless experience for anyone to develop their idea as efficient and frictionless as possible without compromising security, inter-operationality, and scalability. Multi-cloud serverless compute is one of the tools to get there.

We perform all the build and deployment process for different cloud platforms for our users. So, they can just focus on what is important for them, which is, their business. We mean it when we say, they should just focus on their business and operations, not figuring out things like:

Which cloud platform to use?

Where they need to deploy their services?

How much resource they will need? CPU? RAM? How many instances? And where?

We achieve this by managing and driving your cloud build, deployment and executions using policies, and building more intelligence into the platform on how/where/when your application should be built, distributed and executed. We also deploy and execute your functions using our Universal API Gateway.

Understanding The Motivation

Prior to Lyrid, my background for the past 15 years was working on enterprise infrastructure and distributed system software. The workload varied from software that distributes media, transcoding jobs to building scalable storage, and, compute and networking subsystem using various technologies.

I love experimenting with new technologies, but the more I wrote and deployed my code in the cloud, the more I started to realize something.

Reducing Repetition and Guesswork

That is…most of the things we (Cloud Engineers and DevOps) do is actually repetition. We like to think that what we do is so revolutionary, but in most cases are just a combination of your muscle memory (repetition) and guesswork. The challenge of knowing exactly what kind of resources and the amount needed at a given point in time is an ongoing battle for us. There are tons of tools/analytics/monitoring solution software that revolves around these problems.

Here’s what you feel like doing when you guess wrong:

Credit: Office Space (Watch it if you haven’t!)

We are not condoning property destruction, but boy I can really relate to them!

I am sure we can do better than this…It was about 4 years ago that I got my first exposure to serverless by AWS Lambda, and was immediately drawn into the technology. Especially, on how it can remove almost all of the guesswork (at least on the question of “how many instances do I need?”). The baked-in efficiency that is inherited from pay-per-execution cost structure is just something that I had never seen before!

Clearing Misconceptions about Serverless Technology

However, the benefits that I mentioned above does comes with a cost, almost every managed serverless platform out there (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Function, Azure Function, etc.) needs to confirm with the cloud’s specifications on how to “run” your function. Case and point, check out these different entry points for your function input/output that the user has to put together in order to make their code work inside the platform: