---
title: Dev Chats - Going serverless with Deno and Begin
slug: dev-chats-going-serverless-with-deno-and-begin
published_at: 2022-05-04 22:13:21 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:24 +0000
summary: 
description: Begin (https://begin/com) allows developers to effortlessly ship Apps & APIs to AWS. In this live session, we'll have Brian LeRoux and Simon MacDonald hanging out with us live to show off how we can build serverless applications with Deno and Begin. #Stripe #Payments
tags: [@cjav_dev, @cecilphillip, @macdonst, @brianleroux]
views: 617
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/dev-chats-going-serverless-with-deno-and-begin
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbAe7SOa0UI
youtube_id: GbAe7SOa0UI
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/GbAe7SOa0UI
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GbAe7SOa0UI/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Dev Chats - Going serverless with Deno and Begin

*Published: May 04, 2022*
*Views: 617*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbAe7SOa0UI)

[![Dev Chats - Going serverless with Deno and Begin](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GbAe7SOa0UI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbAe7SOa0UI)

## Description

Begin (https://begin/com) allows developers to effortlessly ship Apps & APIs to AWS. In this live session, we'll have Brian LeRoux and Simon MacDonald hanging out with us live to show off how we can build serverless applications with Deno and Begin.
#Stripe #Payments

## Transcript

we're live hi everyone welcome to stripe depth chats where we love to talk about all the cool things that are happening around the world in stripe and also in the development community my name is elsa phillip and today we're going to be learning about something really cool something that i don't know know a lot about and hopefully you don't know a lot about but we'll all kind of learn together when we'll see how it goes so before we kind of dive into our topic and we you know introduce our guests i want to first introduce my co-host cj so cj is joining me for the first time today i really appreciate you stepping in and kind of helping out so why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself really quick and let folks know who you are and what do you do yeah happy to be here um and uh cecil you've been doing a great job with these dev chats so still to jump on i'm cj avila developer advocate at stripe and yeah excited to learn more about uh beginning and deno stuff sorry to like uh yeah scoop scoop the topic there nah that's okay that's fine so like you said we're gonna be learning about begin um which is a interesting new serverless platform and also how we can use deno which from my understanding is like a new javascript runtime that we could use uh to start building some of these serverless applications and to kind of kind of kick us off we have two of these folks here from uh from begin uh we have brian and we have simon and they're gonna talk to us about pretty much how everything works so why don't we have you all introduce yourself um brian why don't we start with you and then we can go to simon and then we can kind of just dive into it sure hi i'm brian um i'm a co-founder of begin and uh maintainer of uh architect arc.codes which is the sort of underpinning of begin uh begins a platform for building functional web apps uh sometimes people will call a serverless serverless is more of an ethos whereas uh functional web apps are more about uh cloud functions code and uh mostly maintainer of our our demo runtime for aws and uh simon you're turning and i'm sam mcdonald the head of developer experience app again and you can see all the wonderful things that brian does so that doesn't leave me with very much left which is a pretty good job if you can get it i gotta tell you uh no i i handle uh way too many wrangling of cats at began but i've been enjoying every last minute of it that's awesome now like we do every show before we actually dive into the main topic i do have some links i want to share um just to share some quick updates and again let folks know what has been going on so really quickly i'm going to pull up my screen and why don't we go ahead and go through some of these links real quick and i'm definitely not at the top so here we go so the first thing i want to share with you so stripe connect attempt and this was published on april 28th so just a couple of days ago now stripe connect is a product that we have that allows us to create like marketplace type experiences and as you can see here we've been doing it for 10 years now so for 10 years we've been able to enable this experience for a lot of different folks and companies and so we definitely appreciate all of you all that have been you know joining us and working with us and like helping us kind of um you know helping us build up this really great experience um cj you want to tell folks a little bit in like 10 seconds like what is connect like what is connect four like what do people do with it sure yeah stripe connect is uh the product the stripe product that would you that you would use to build a marketplace or a platform so if you think about companies like lyft where they're facilitating payments between a rider and a driver the driver would become what's called a connected account and that is a way that you sort of associate uh this business entity that is the driver with the platform that is lift and then you can sort of accept payments from all these riders and make sure that the drivers are being paid out similarly if you're building an e-commerce platform like shopify you can enable vendors to set up these shops and receive payment this is all done through stripe connect which sort of allows you to build these third-party uh marketplace these marketplaces where you can yeah facilitate payments so so you're saying if i wanted to sell nfts [Laughter] i'm gonna leave it alone please please please if i wanted to create marketplaces so let's say i had you know other folks that were selling recipes or renting cars or whatever the cases and i wanted to sell it through my platform yeah you know i mean i could essentially have like some type of onboarding experience where they could sign up and you know all of the payments will get processed through my platform and then forward it on along to those other folks that are actually providing the service right yep that's right and there's technically like a if you want you can also just use it purely for payouts so um you could set it up so that all you're doing is facilitating payment on the payout side and then maybe you're accepting payment some other way but yeah stripe connect is uh it's also sort of the backbone for stripe treasury which is this new banking as a service where you can embed banking and create neo bank type services as part of your offering so um i think stripe connect is going to become an even more fundamental part of these really amazing powerful tech products uh over the next few years so awesome it's been a decade i know yeah a long time it has it has all right so let's move forward to the next link so um we're going to be having a developer office hours in five days right so that'll be on may 10th and cj you're going to be talking about how to get started with link right yeah so link is a really interesting new payment method type that allows you to give your customers a faster checkout essentially they can sort of save their payment details for later and enables essentially one click checkout through your own hosted form so this is already possible to check out like stripe checkout today but if you're using the payment element and you're building your own custom forms we have this offering coming soon where the customer will be sort of prompted to enter a one-time pin that they receive on their phone so they put their email address in they'll get texted a thing they can put in a pin and that will preload all their previous payment method types their address and all of that so they can just do one click checkout directly through your site so we'll build a full end-to-end demo uh next week so it should be pretty exciting nice and then the last thing i want to share with folks so a lot of people might not know this but we actually have like a i guess we can call it like a dev.2 organization for stripe so a lot of our developer advocates and some other folks you know write blog posts and different articles and then we post it over there you know once or twice a week or so and so this one is from our teammate matlin who posted a recent post that talks about how you can get started with the striped shell and for folks that may not know this if you go into our documentation there's actually a secret command that you can hit on your keyboard that will actually pop up a command line terminal inside your browser and it'll have the stripe cli and some other really interesting tools that you could use to start interacting with you know your stripe account you know like the log account that you're actually logged in so um again this blog post kind of one has a video here that you could watch if you wanted to but it also kind of goes through the steps of showing you how you can invoke the actual um stripe cell inside of your browser and i feel like we have to do other things we could do i feel like we have to build cecil you want to do it okay all right doom so all right i have i feel like i think it'd be signed in don't have to be signed up i don't know yeah maybe yeah let's do it and not sign in it's gonna be like an experiment because i have never done it and not signed it okay i want to click on this accepted payment thing maybe and i'm going to hit control yeah and here you have at the bottom here's the strike show right and if i wanted to so i could do things like stripe status oh they did some stuff no one is only supported by a local install okay i guess i can't use that command if i do maybe stripe account oh it looks like it does like autocomplete for me that's cool yeah that's so good maybe stripe customer create straight what's left oh you have to log in let's log in all right i'm going to move this to the side i'm going to log in really quick and then hopefully after i log in it'll let me play around with some stuff steve this is how you know things are live because this is when you start moving around browsers and things of that nature then you know yeah this was definitely not planned yeah yoko said uh yes do it so we we've got to do it i know you're logging in over there so we're gonna okay thanks so much for watching all right so you're live i'm i've logged into the thing i don't know if i have to restart this novel let's do that okay now let's do other stripe accounts and notice as i'm typing it's like telling me stuff that i could do right so accounts is like the uh the noun right and then now we're seeing like those different verbs that you can execute against the noun right so there's retrieve update list delete i'm not going to delete anything because i think that's a bad idea but i will list stuff and then i'm sure what you'll see is here you go i have 10 items inside of here now i'm not going to show you all what accounts i have because i don't want to show you all my information but just know that it's there as you can see um what else do we have cj i can show you payment links yeah i mean stripe customers create do a like let's make a customer you want to make a customer or or yeah yeah yeah stripe customers create all right see cj's going to make me do this stripe customer notice how they're all pluralized so they'll let you know when you're not mixing stuff so create yep and that's all you really need is something you could do like uh email and like yeah or send a name yeah email right and do i have to do i have to do like this sure so at don't email me dot com yeah this is yeah what's really cool about this is that like it brings the stripe cli directly into the dock so you can play around with the api just like as you're testing stuff out so yeah type ahead not just tab complete and then i think you can also click on those drop down things and they are links so like this oh wow look at that yeah boom that's very cool yeah balance i'm guessing i just give this a number yeah i mean you don't have to pass it yeah like yeah yeah i have so much money what's going to happen let's see what happens error so i'm going to guess that i need stuff right am i missing something amount must be no more than oh i have too much money so that's too much money yeah but here's one thing i want you to notice too because it's inside of the browser it doesn't mean that you can't do some of those normal commands that you're used to so if you notice i could do stripe and i hit up the up arrow and notice it just like auto completes just like you would have if you're inside of z shell or bash or one of those other things and now i can come back i can edit this i'm going to make myself a little bit poorer and and there you go right now you've gone ahead and recreated which is really cool now here's the id for the account i'm guessing if i click on this what it's going to do it's going to go over to the account that i was signed into that's not what you're supposed to say but anyway but anyway anyway what i'm saying is that whatever account that you sign into it'll go ahead and create this stripe account and you know if you wanted to i think you can click on this thing and you could switch the accounts that you're in yeah so for instance right now i'm in this this that one i can you know go to my cp test account oh i got to sign in again anyway y'all get the point you can go in here and you can use you can use the stripe cli you can start playing around with it and doing a lot of cool stuff inside of the box that's great so hopefully folks try it out definitely love to to hear what you think about it um i don't know what else is in here i know the cli is in here do we have like curl and stuff in here can i curl stuff no i can't no yeah it's it's like obviously like just the stripe stuff that i have w get i don't have w i have ls oh hello lx can i see you in the quick start [Music] now we have samples so how awesome is that right so we can kind of navigate through the world of you know documentation pretty much yeah and kind of see what some of the cool things that we could play around with inside of the stripe um you know inside of the striped shell inside of our docks that's awesome cool and steve was saying beware of the demo gods yes i did not i did not make a demo god offering i apologize next time i'll sacrifice like some php or something and then you know all will be good all right so so that being said that's all the links that i wanted to share today i'm going to take my screen off uh and this is like the point of the show where i say hey this is no longer you know this is no longer about us but this is like this is uh this is our guest show and i think it's time that we begin talking about again so what we're going to do so yeah um so i think brian why don't we start off with you right tell us like what exactly is begin like why does it exist why is it here you know what is it what does it do for us yeah so um when we started building with aws a few years ago we found it a little bit challenging and we we loved the story of serverless um and and the whole idea of serverless is about outsourcing so there's a lot of stuff that we could build and do um you know back in the day i used to literally physically mount server racks and plug-in ethernet cables and you know we don't do that anymore we obviously go to the cloud and so the logical conclusion of the cloud would be that we we outsource compute entirely the ideal would be that we outsource compute to the point where i'm only paying for it by the millisecond and the primitive for that that kind of kicked all that off was lambda in 2014. and amazon is very famously a very large surface area to work with and they're always growing and it's always getting more and more complicated so we created an open source project called architect and you can find that at arc.codes for kind of wrangling these primitives and we we quickly kind of realized that we want to build a very specific kind of application we call those applications functional web apps the idea of a functional web app is that we're focused on building the cloud functions and we're using a managed database and we're deploying with infrastructure as code and begin is a platform that lets you do that by just signing in with your github so instead of trying to like deal with figuring out even how to get started with amazon which is a fairly daunting task you can just click sign in with github and uh create an app within like 30 seconds and that's that's really the story with begin we want to drop that time down to uh iteration down to seconds and we only want to focus on business logic so we just want to write cloud functions um i think that kind of covers the sort of the begin backgrounder is is is architects so i'm guessing architect is like the thing that like begins sits on top of is architect solely for aws or can i look at this as a thing that i can run across different clouds and even you know locally on my own infrastructure if i wanted to it works locally um people have made attempts at ports to other clouds although there's nothing that's been officially merged we've done some light work uh exploring different cloud functions providers like cloudflare or azure functions they're really not um the the space hasn't commodified to the point that we could abstract over them and have a consistent interface yet and they have just two different semantics between them and actually this dovetail is nicely talking about deno because they have their own cloud functions thing now too a deno function really isn't anything like a lambda function a lambda function really isn't anything like an azure function or a gcp firebase function i think that will change over time i think right now we're kind of in this early moment where we're figuring out what does this mean when we get rid of the server metaphor and everybody's mixing it up and trying different things and that's good like we want that you know diversity but at some point it'll it'll probably start to consolidate my guess is that we're going to see that consolidation approach something more like lambda they they are just so far ahead uh you know aws did that in 2014 i think the next nearest provider was azure and that was like 20 yeah i want to say 18 or 19. like yeah so we have a lot of years of uh fun ahead of us right that's fair yeah and that being said if anybody's listening from any of the non-aws clouds you know pull requests welcome we would love for you to come work with us on that yeah yeah the big difference for me um like azure and gcp are both kind of based on containers and they're more around longer lived workloads and so you start a container and then you you write functions but they run inside this container lambda functions are a brand new abstraction on what's called a micro vm it's not a container it's based on a thing called aws firecracker which is open source these micro vms start up execute and go away they are completely stateless and this is a huge operational difference so you can scale out like thousands of worker threads in literal seconds um whereas starting and stopping a container is typically quite slow and that's the sort of dreaded cold start so the other clouds are getting around this dreaded cold start by having a container running it's warm accepting multiple requests but it's not truly stateless so that semantic difference actually makes a huge difference down the road for both performance and security and so i feel personally that the future is going to belong to stateless um horizontal auto scaling that's how it's always worked that's probably how it will continue to work but the other clouds just aren't there yet with the exception of cloudflare i should say they they do have um their own kind of idea around this but it's based on v8 isolates which is a tiny slice of the v8 runtime and that's great because javascript and we love javascript but it kind of sucks because it's not unix and you can't do all the stuff that you can do with unix you can only do the stuff that you can do in v8 which is very limited at the moment sorry that was a lot of words no no that's fine that's fine and actually talking about um cloudflare we actually had um luke edwards from cloudflare come on and talk to us about workers and pages so for folks that are watching um you know you can head over to the stripe developers youtube page you can kind of you know go backwards in time and like check out that old episode if you wanted to um so here's one of the things that i always wonder about what i think about serverless uh because usually serverless things are always like a tied to a platform as much as folks like to say oh we can move it around like to really get like the benefits of all the things like you really have to be attached to like a thing right yeah whether it's azure or aws or whatever the cases so with begin how much like how much integration does it have outside of lambda functions like can i plug into sqs or ses or you know some of those other you know um what's those things called like um uh storage or any of those other services that aws has in a very like intuitive way yeah so architect the open source underpinning lets you take any begin you can take any begin app and run it on your own amazon first of all so we're not locking you into our uh platform we're more of a deployment tool than we are a platform the uh architect project has this concept called plugins uh those allow you to modify the generated cloud formation so you can muck about with any of the aws primitives you want we've actually been around for a while now we shipped architect initially in 2017 believe it or not so over the prevailing years we flushed it out pretty good i would be surprised if there was a capability we didn't already have a plug-in for or couldn't do um there is edgy stuff in there like we don't really do much with like the suite of services around machine learning for example architect and beginner really concerned with building dynamic web applications so that's kind of the bread and butter but yeah we support sqs ses sms all the three-letter acronyms you can think of right we try and hide that though and let you focus on your business logic that's kind of our thing yeah it's not just the aws lambda layer you can use s3 cues events tables streams all that sort of stuff with architect that the main benefit from a developer experience point of view is you're you don't drop yourself in the aws console and may have to make 140 decisions you have some sensible defaults to get you going yeah and this decision fatigue is is not a problem that's going to go away amazon is uh kind of an incredible organization that they just keep adding stuff and like they do it to the point where they're competing with themselves in some of their products and like it's almost bizarre so it's a real big elephant to kind of tackle you just got to chew it one bite at a time um like if you use architect it's a fast forward button you're going to be on all the serverless stuff like in seconds it's it's bizarre but it's also comforting because you know whatever they introduce today is going to be there 10 years from now because they're never taking anything away they're just going to keep adding and adding nothing's going to break so you have confidence that whatever you pick you'll be able to keep using for a very long time yeah and then on that note actually i'd say of the companies that i admire for how they do their apis stripe and amazon there's really good formal backwards compatibility i feel extremely safe writing code for these platforms because i know you know you're not going to pull the rug on me and change stuff amazon does this to the point though where it's almost like ugly so if you look at their oldest apis s3 i think it's the second oldest maybe there's a whole bunch of functions in there that are just post fixed v2 v3 like you'd like put object v2 and like it looks gross and like everybody who initially encounters this is like oh that's bad um but i challenge you to think for a second actually how great that is because that means you write your code and you know that's going to run forever on their platform and that's uh that's a big deal because i don't need unplanned work due to aesthetic concerns yeah that's a good point um so we've been talking about begin for a little bit i'd love to see like what does it actually feel like from a developer perspective yeah create a new begin application so i'm going to share my screen awesome i hope and then while you're doing that i'll you know i'll go ahead and uh um i'll ask simon a question too so we're kind of just looking at architect and i was as you were talking i was clicking around a little bit on the um the website i'm gonna guess that architect is specific for javascript like like are they other languages i can run with architect or is this only like no you can run yeah javascript is kind of what we use most days but you can use ruby or python with architect as well there's yeah there's no reason why you can use those as well um our sdks support those as like first-class citizens so awesome yeah all the dynamic languages i'm a big fan of ruby and um and we have of course uh what i'm calling experimental support for denno today okay cool so why don't we take a look like how do i how do i i want to write a serverless thing like right now like how do i do it okay all right so uh i'm at begin.com i'm gonna log in with my github it's gonna do the oauth dance and it's going to redirect me around so this is my sort of like app console page and it's like those are all the apps that you created before and then now you're going to go create a new one yeah exactly i'm always creating messes in here so don't don't at least there's no swear words um so most of our examples are very node.js centric but if you click on this demo tab we do actually have a couple i'm just going to do hello world and i'm going to pray to the demo gods are on my side today by saying demo gods these work well i did i did make an offering before the uh calls okay so this is doing a whole bunch of stuff in the background it's in a queue right now oh so it created this repo for me in github and it oh code in there and i know that because this event kicked off by the way begin is a serverless app this is all um built and deployed with itself uh which is a serverless app that you use to build serverless apps yes yeah and uh this is all the way down yeah yeah cloud functions all the way through so sometimes people ask you know can you do like real timey stuff and yeah i mean this is web sockets and uh pop open my my console we might even see those sockets oh i can't because it already built all right we'll go look at that so it just built like a silly hello world you know nothing too big and you could kind of feel the cold start there but i'm going to go edit that on github and there's this you know this disturbs people sometimes but sometimes we'll just return a string of html like wild animals um but i'm not gonna do that right now i'm gonna do i'm gonna do something kind of funny i'm gonna be like uh let's say denim version and we'll just do this as a test so you know deno uh first thing to notice this is a typescript file so deno supports typescript by default which is kind of nice uh you don't have a build step you just you know treat it like you do and it's got this global where you can get the versions of everything on on it so i'll commit that i'll pop over here the web hook fired a websocket event happened right now this is just streaming data back into the into the begin build system it's typically the worst step is npm install but if you're running demo you don't have that problem and now it's in the deployment queue and it'll pump that function at some point in the next few seconds up to to its final destination on our staging stack um but by default we we have a convention where commits to maine will go to staging and then get tags go to production um so if i click on that you can see now that it's returning and i've got deno one two one and i've got this version of v8 and this version of typescript nice and uh yeah that's that's kind of it actually that's that's the uh that's all it really takes to get going with denno i've got my repo set up there's obviously a ton of stuff that we can do in here that's like you know above and beyond what's going on but that's the sort of baseline and then if you want to try it out locally and you don't want to give me your github credentials um that's totally cool too i've got um this thing called architect installed which i got by npm ig architect architect oh wow typing on a pillow right now okay so i'm gonna make a directory and just call it like uh denno it's cool we'll jump in the den of his coo and i'll run arcanet run time it goes down and i actually have a bug in here so that worked and that's all cool but the bug is by default we are right now um encouraging people to go on arm64 but my demo builds are only working on x86 so i'm going to delete that from the configuration and then it's just this one file and it's you know rendering some html i'll run arc sandbox and so we architect is an open source project for building serverless apps and all the begin apps that we deploy are are based on architect and one of the big features of architect is that we emulate out all of the services on amazon locally so you don't have to you know deploy this to aws in order to see it working uh you can just run it locally and box your uncle that's that's perfect for like a lot of those scenarios where we talk about hey i want to build an application i want to use the cloud but like there's no local cloud right and i'm i'm yeah i'm an airplane or i'm at the park or in wherever and i'm not connected to wi-fi or ethernet cable how do i how do i do work right and so what you're saying is that you're able to emulate some of these things to make it a little bit easier for us to kind of keep going exactly it's so important you know i i think there's been a bit of a myth in the serverless world that you can't work locally and that's just not true is it hard to work locally it's harder actually with a traditional three-tier monolith in my view and you don't load test your three-tier monolith locally you you deploy that to a staging environment to load test it you just want to preview stuff or maybe you want to add a route and see if it worked or check out a payload or run the unit tests that's what the local dev environment is really all about i think architect is unique in this way i think we're the only ones that support a local dev environment and then the other frameworks say it's impossible which is for them maybe it is but i've i've found i've found that amazon is is very stable um yeah like i said they don't change apis and we've been around for five years so like when we you know when we encounter a new thing we'll definitely add it but it's it's a compounding value you know once you start investing in that local experience and uh it really does pay off awesome i just want to point sorry i just want to point out one thing before we move on like that app that brian created in the begin ui he could do a get clone of that on his local system and then start building locally you don't actually have to start with the npm init command from arc yeah that's true too and all of this stuff is open source and you can run on your own amazon account you don't need us actually one other thing i should share that i think is semi-relevant to this audience's interests um if you want to get going uh with with dino this is nothing i think it's dino sorry i should have i should have brought this up sooner i say i say deno also all the time um but we have uh we open sourced our lambda layer and uh if you want to run your own you know lambda with deno uh all you need to do is copy and paste this into your own cloud formation and um yeah we keep this pretty in sync with them and we've been on this for quite a while now and uh yeah that's basically our vibes there so so let's let's head over to the chat really quick because it looks like we have a couple of comments and questions that folks folks of the country steve has correctly pointed out it's dino it is you know so we had this conversation yesterday in a meeting and i was like i think it's denno and i think someone i think cj you might have said i think it's dino and i'm like we're going to ask on the stream today and we're going to find out the right thing so they changed it man so ryan when he first presented it like forever ever ago it was in 2018 was calling it denno and then i think somebody convinced him it should be dino because it's like a little dinosaur guy oh and so oh yeah so the official pronunciation is dino okay so the spelling didn't change but they just decided to change like the phonetics of it okay that's fine that's fine i mean as a canadian you'll catch me saying javascript sometimes javascript so like that's funny it's like an accent um we also have edward edward is coming in from youtube and he's asking what are the benefits of using dino that's a very good question i almost said denno again what the benefits of using dino versus node versus rust for serverless functions i have opinions on that but i'll let you all uh so so this is you know i mean not exactly apples and oranges rust is incredible you're going to write a lot of characters for not a lot of functionality but you're going to get incredible performance so i would i would treat rust like that last knife in my boot when i really needed to like eek out every last little bit of perf um but you probably don't need it now dino versus r uh node is a is a apples and apples question that's a good one and it's a tough one because i am obviously extremely exuberant about the future for dino i don't think it's quite there yet they're still iterating on it um it's you know only recently 1.0 it is 1.0 and it's fairly stable but there's still things changing about it and the ecosystem's still coming together they really only recently have had the ability to run a lot of common javascript libraries and they are working on a node compatibility layer but i think your best bet right now is uh put your production workloads on node and keep a hairy eyeball on demo and um we'll probably be using both for quite a while as developers we like to think that we're gonna have you know one language to rule them all but truly it's it's a good thing to have more than one runtime do you wanna comment on the cold start difference between dino and node that's true too so node is not getting faster and dino is and dino's screaming fast um currently dino is living in a land a layer though in our world and that lambda layer has a penalty and so they're very comparable but if if and when i should say amazon decides to go fully uh native runtimes manage runtime support for dino it's going to smoke mode i think it starts in like 20 milliseconds as opposed to node which the fastest i've seen at cold start is 50 milliseconds so we're talking about 30 milliseconds here though i mean like so you know like i'm curious to like i know that earlier we were talking about isolates i'm like yeah what is it like isolate versus this firecracker thing and like yeah can you do isolates like just with node i like i when i heard about isolates the first time it was like just from like dino deploy type stuff and so i'm like yeah can you help us understand the yeah your perspective on that so um isolates are a like sandbox primitive built inside of the v8 runtime um and so they are a way to run a a language thread v8 is pretty convinced that that is completely isolated i don't know with heartbleed inspector if i believe that to be frank i don't know if they can do that and i'm sure it would be very hard but um i'm not entirely certain so you're running in a shared space now the language is the virtual machine of that shared space and so in theory this is impossible to break out of that sandbox but i don't know theories are good practice it's a whole other thing yeah now the firecracker vm is a different story it's a it's a virtual machine it's a full posix environment it's an entire linux operating system running in uh like a kvm space and so it is uh completely demarcated yeah so it's actually isolated i guess so isolates are probably isolated where whereas i would say firecracker you have a much stronger guarantee of of isolation and then like um and you can run javascript like you can run node in isolates or you can run dino and isolates or no you can no so i think dino is based i think dino deploy is based on isolates um but really isolates are a language level thing all this positive systems and i o and network and all that is is actually happening outside of that and so yeah there are different worlds entirely okay and then that's kind of the downside of this isolates thing is that you're sort of stuck in the javascript world now people will say wasm solves that but no one's demonstrated it to solve it yet so got it yeah got it so yeah let's like make the cold start problem go away and then we can just use the lambda stuff i think yeah and the cold start thing is a bit of a red herring these days like we see we do see like around 100 200 millisecond cold starts it's not that bad and uh it does keep dropping and this is just industrialization you know doing its thing stuff's getting used more so it gets faster smaller cheaper with time yeah okay and the last comments i want to get to inside of the uh the chatter really quick before we move on so steve mcardle so steve is here every week so i again i always try and shout out steve because i really appreciate steve cubbin and every week with all like questions and comments and and all that type of stuff um so steve's asking can i get a vs code plug-in for that now i don't know what your roadmap looks like or i don't know if there's a community thing that's already in existence that's happening but could you could you shed some light on this really quickly i'm a dim guy so um simon i know we have some of this in the go in the community yeah we do have i have low standards so i'm the wrong one to ask yeah brian learned them 20 years ago and he hasn't learned anything new since which is you know he's using his brain cycles on other things uh but yes we do have a vs code plug-in uh right now for the most part it just does syntax highlighting of architect files uh so instead of having to write say 1700 lines of cloud formation you can write 14 lines of an arc file and we decided to syntax highlight it because you know everybody has that uh but definitely this is something that we want to add some additional capabilities to you so that you can deploy uh using the vs code plugin as well for folks love vs code so any way we can help there would be awesome actually can i show can i demonstrate that yeah that'd be great yeah probably let me just i'm not gonna show the highlighting but i want to show the thing that simon pointed out because it's it's actually shocking and it's sometimes i think this should just be our homepage so if you go to arc.codes you can see uh all of the horrifying amazon setup that you have to do but if you go to arc.code playground you can see why you might care and so i don't know if you guys can see this but on the left this is the configuration file uh for architect and it's um i'm declaring i'm going to have an app named my app i want an api gateway that responds to let's let's blow this open actually any star so if any request comes in this i'm going to have a lambda function handle it and then on the right here is the generated cloud formation for doing that now some people claim you can write this by hand i think those people are lying because this would take a time i mean you could write it by hand do you want to write it by hand that's a different question i mean like i definitely do not want to write that or debug it so yeah architect in many ways is really just a compiler where we're taking this high level manifest format we're compiling it down into native cloud formation and uh and that that's why that's you know what what you probably want to do is focus on building your app not learning this insane i have like a wild question and like a wild idea i know like it's like you're taking this architect file and you're building out these lambda function cloudformation things have you ever considered like taking an architect file and spitting out like a rails app that has yeah yeah okay okay yeah so well another thing we've tried too is running our sandbox inside of a container and then deploying that to heroku it worked it was slow but it worked okay um yeah so there's actually a really great project out there and i can't remember the name off the top of my head but uh someone has done this oh this actually exists and it kind of works so recently aws expanded your temp disk and a lambda to 10 gigabytes and you can back it with a docker container up to 10 gigabytes so like you can build a lot of app and one lambda function i don't know what the cold starts like on this yeah it's probably not very good we've correlated cold start roughly to how much code you're loading so you kind of want to keep these functions small um but can you put a rails app into a to function you can and you want to probably not yeah it's worth checking out though and i know it's out there yeah we we definitely have tutorials where you take an already running express application wrapping it into lambda and then slowly decomposing it into multiple functions and then at the end your express app goes away and you're left with an api gateway with a bunch of functions and that's a good place to be and that's actually how we got into this ourselves i think everybody's first inclination with lambda is i'll throw an express server in there yeah and then it will work it'll totally work great and then you add more and more code and it gets slower and slower life gets harder and harder um so this this is the ultimate way is to split these up into small constituent parts and have them all deploy independently so one more question um i was actually going to ask this question but steve beat me to it and so i want to give him credit for it and the question is what have you found the ramp up speed for first time architect users today yeah pretty quick i mean um we have no dependencies uh so you need uh node and then you can get going um if you want to deploy to aws that time goes up significantly and i recommend joining our discord uh to get a hand with the community i mean there's there's no way to sugarcoat this uh amazon's a big beast and you've got to give them once you get them your credit card there's still a whole bunch of hoops you have to jump to get set up i think you need two versions of python you need to have aws cli there's just a whole bunch of wrangling to do and this is another reason for the local development experience we don't want that to be a barrier for you to get started and another reason to use begin instead of using amazon um but we're not here to lock you in or anything like that so yeah real fast to get started maybe fast to deploy if you use begin i would i mean i've been using amazon for almost a decade now and i still am learning new things all the time i know i don't think there's a moment where i'm going to be like oh sweet i got this like it's just a huge a huge thing right so so here's here's what i'm curious about so every time i talk to a service person or someone has a service platform or even when you go to a conference i always hear what are these things good for meaning like what types of apps can i build with these you know beyond like the serverless web api scenarios which i think are probably much probably the most common use cases that i've seen with serverless in general like what other types of solutions have you seen people build you know not just on begin but just like with service in general like what kind of things do we do with this well the current definitely it's like all about dynamic web apps and i think like the front-end community is really driving right now towards like um realizing that static is is not cutting it uh i need a callback for that shopping cart um you know and so like even for that just little tiny bit of functionality and integrate strike you're not going to want to put those keys in the browser yeah you want to have that trusted background process and so cloud functions are great for these use cases and that's where the bread and butter is people are doing some wild stuff out there though so there are very massive machine learning workloads coming online now that the new temp disk is bigger so people are using it to parallelize workloads that they formerly just couldn't do or couldn't do as quickly so like video transcoding uh i saw a demonstration of recently where you know normally it would take like an hour to transcode this big video uh between formats but you know they just spawned like a billion lambda functions and just did it all in parallel and it happened in seconds so that's a cool use case we use web sockets quite a bit and this is something i have not written enough about aws figured out this really cool pattern where you can have a stateless application and functions but they'll take care of the statefulness of the socket and so all you have to do is write the glue code and you don't have to worry about connections or retries or any of that junk it just it's all there for you so i'm kind of expecting games uh to increasingly become a thing uh we have a friend who also recently did a demo for us where they were working with webrtc and uh using the amazon socket business that's out there there is light at the end of the tunnel for the cold start thing too so i think yeah more real-time applications um are are probably gonna increasingly happen um but yeah for me anyways it's just for like sprinkling in just a bit of a little bit of dynamic functionality over that static thing and then maybe thinking maybe it's not necessary to be static right like right now these things are so cheap and they're so fast like why would i wait for the build step let someone else deal with that and if you don't believe us you can probably believe the bbc which finished converting over their static website to a fully dynamic serverless thing over the past couple of years so they're using exactly the same type of functional web pattern that we like to use as well so it helps validate what we're doing yeah yeah it's um it's a it's a weird new world and there's so many of these new primitives too and i i wouldn't like we're very lambda centric we're very awsy like cloudflare is obviously at the forefront of figuring out how to do this stuff with their workers and durable objects azure has been around for a while and i haven't heard much from them in a minute but you know i still think that they're a force and they have their own kind of perspective and point of view about how this should work with their functions thing yeah and uh yeah i feel people should just explore and see what works for them but i'd be surprised if there was a thing you couldn't build today uh serverlessly that's true okay um so with that being said i'm kind of curious like what are some of the things that you and your team are planning for the future specifically when it comes to begin because like so we see that obviously there's the aws integration we see that you could now start experiments with like that that detail run time in there um you know i saw you do like some vi foo and like created things uh i had to call it out because i know cj's a big vi fan so i know he uses vi a little bit um and we felt like that was really funny because it looks impressive but the truth is i just can't use any other thing anymore to keep like once you learn all these shortcuts you're kind of like trapped it's like a weird form of lock-in muscle memory lock-in yeah i've accidentally seen brian uh reboot a computer when trying to use vs code it's not pretty so [Laughter] that's true so we have a lot in our roadmap right now and um oh man so we're we we got really excited about uh we realized that we were speaking not the right language we were talking about serverless but what we meant was functional web apps so we shipped a site called fwa.dev recently to really start tearing apart the patterns of building with just pure functions yeah i'm personally really stoked about that but it's kind of academic and it's a little bit boring it's like taking functional programming ideas and applying it to cloud functions so like one of the things that you can do in functional programming if you have the same inputs and the same outputs we call that pure um purity allows for this concept called referential integrity which means you can you can swap any two functions that beat the same contract the same thing is true with a serverless application so we can uh take a say a node 18 lambda function and turn that into a deno function and like we didn't have that capability before you know the rails app if you wanted to change something you're changing everything kind of and now we can like take constituent bits and pieces and move move them around and change it so you can expect to see more about functional web app from us um we we also we've had a really tough relationship um sorry steve you're right it's dino not donna um i like custody's calling us out in this chat it's awesome so we we have a a weird relationship with static and and jam stack lots of people use serverless that are in this world but this is very much a dynamic world and so trying to figure out how to bridge these worlds has been a big point for us in the last year we ourselves used react to build the first version to begin and then we migrated it over to pre-act because it was getting kind of clunky and slow to work with and then we migrated it to vanilla web components and we're pretty stoked on that pattern and we're actually looking to open source some work around that in the coming year um we're very early but we think that the future will most likely be people writing to the browser it's another reason i'm really excited about dino because it's implementing direct browser apis and i imagine this future where i'm just writing for the browser you know i'm writing vanilla web components to web standards and publishing that stuff and it's going to run forever because the browser runs forever and i'm not chasing somebody else's roadmap or trying to upgrade code because somebody in my module ecosystem upgraded me yeah and yeah so really jazzed about web components and um we're probably gonna start having some strong opinions around how to uh approach your ui and it's gonna look shocking and strange but um i i think that people are gonna be pretty stoked so it's a it's not intuitive you'd think us like we've been fairly back end focused and we've always been very um agnostic to the front end but the front end has been a conveyor belt and uh that conveyor belt just i i want off i don't care anymore like i don't need another component model we've got one it's standardized fine i'm going to write code ship it and then write new code i don't want to maintain code i already had and chase chase somebody else's idea of aesthetics so yeah those are some of the things that we're thinking about anything else simon that we should intend yeah i i guess the cli would be the other thing that we should talk about so that sounds important yeah the web ui is great and it helps people get started but a lot of folks like to work on the command line uh myself included so being able to run the begin cli in order to create new apps deploy do anything that you would do from the the web interface is going to be coming out uh before the end of the year as well yeah that's a big one i can't believe i missed that you wrote most of it that's why i did write that code number that is mine we have a lot of that in our company it's like who wrote this oh wait i wrote this okay so then i know what you when you showed us like that demo inside of your browser like you're already set up and ready to go but i'm i'm going to assume that like all i need to do to get started with begin all i need to begin with begin is just like a github account right that's right can i do it without a github account or do i need to get overcome you need to get a hub account for now we are just started looking at gitlab because we get past that every day um yeah i felt like that's the right way to do it you know most people are on github but there's a lot of developers on other platforms so we're we're keeping an eye out to the warmth there you know the thing i find is really interesting because i like to look at like the evolvability of how we do development over time and you know i feel like github is more than just a company now it's almost like a part of like developer culture you know it's like the expectation of you know you having some something that you know you store your portfolio of work on and so when you talk about like tying github into like your workflow process you're like okay well i have the cloud and i have my source control thing and then maybe i have like the cloud editor like code spaces or git pod or the thing that i can code in that's not on my machine and uninstalled here and so now your whole workflow doesn't exist on your machine anymore which now when you think about it i find it makes it very accessible for people that don't have high-powered machines you know maybe i'm on a tablet or maybe i just need to do a quick edit and i need to spin up environments really quickly and i need to deploy quickly and i don't want to do the whole you know mpm install the internet thing i just want to go quickly and kind of get to it yeah totally and that's sort of how i feel like the whole thing is moving and the more of the automation's also moving into this like github is definitely becoming this crazy platform it's like like actions is a great example like that is a wonderful way to work and uh writing a github action not so wonderful but once it's written they're wonderful yeah yeah yeah and that being said recently we did release a couple of composite actions that make the the building and the deploying of architect applications easier you just include the composite action in your github action you don't have to worry about stuff you just need the aws environment variables to be shared secrets in your organization or in your project yeah those are great i used those just a few weeks ago too thank you for writing this simon i never want to write it again i wasn't trying to take credit i just was like one character often a yaml file i can't see it it's impossible yeah like error line two it's like there's no error there or there's a copy and paste and there's an invisible character and it's like oh that's not valid yaml and the whole thing blows up i love that oh my god that caught me a couple of times and i'd spent maybe like an hour trying to figure out like what's the problem with this code i'm like oh okay there we go yeah i'm old enough to remember that sometimes the best thing to do is just to retype it so that it's like oh yeah there was a hidden character in there definitely my gosh that's hilarious well well general we're pretty much [ __ ] about time now we're at the top of the hour um do you have any you know anything that you want to leave our audience with any takeaways any any next steps calls to action things you want them to try out as we you know just before we close yeah tell them to well tryoutbegin.com uh check out arc.codes check out fwa.dev somewhere in those three websites you should be able to find simon and i either on discord or twitter we are open source oldies and love helping so you know don't hesitate to ask uh bug me please follow those issues and just let us know what's up and uh we're always happy to help awesome yeah echo what brian's saying we're we're always here to help so just please reach out in any of those different avenues great well gentlemen again thank you all so much for being here and thank all of you that are still here and been hanging out with us for the past hour uh we do dev chats every other wednesday we might change that soon but for now we're doing it every other wednesday so we hope you join us again in another two weeks we have more amazing guests talking about a lot of cool things that they're working on so that being said thank you all for joining us and we will see you next time for stripe chats bye everybody [Music] you

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