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Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

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Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#111

Post by pwinnski »

birdstheword5 wrote: post #108
pwinnski wrote: post #53

My previous company went "full serverless" on new development, and delivered amazing performance at very low cost. My general opinion has flipped after that experience. I believe there are use cases where serverless isn't an option, but not very many. I think most people don't realize just how "burstable" their own traffic is. If you're looking at graphs with one-hour resolution, remember that AWS bills for lambda at…

Interesting. How would you compare the developer experience between the two approaches? And what was your use case?

The serverless dev experience was delightful! I'd work on a single lambda, or maybe a "stack" of related lambdas, and each was focused and lean. A serverless approach is also probably-necessarily a microservices approach, which removes a lot of complication.

It was in EdTech, so we had students downloading assignments, uploading results (lambda-fronted S3 for blob storage, DynamoDB for data), administrators paging through result, grading things, students uploading images and videos of themselves, administrators reviewing them, many lambdas being triggered by changes to S3 or DynamoDB tables, or SNS messages sent from other lambdas.

I don't think most people would consider it especially bursty, except in the most general sense around midterms and finals, but in truth even a "heavy user" is only hitting APIs every so many seconds at most, and like I said, AWS lambda bills at the millisecond level.

Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#112

Post by liampulles »

I think more important than the serverless question (and btw I agree with you, I I lean towards it not being a good idea) is whether they are wearing "Vendor tinted glasses".

I tried hard to think of advice on how you may remove the glasses if that is the situation here, but in honesty it is a tricky one. It is akin to a little worldview; bubble, and those are tricky to try and actively shift in others (an attempt at a suggestion: I think perhaps it would be best to come into team discussions around this not as being on "one side" but rather as being the reasoned, dispassionate expert on all sides; the whole question).

I say this is someone who up until recently wore the glasses (in my case it was for Kubernetes) - it took me a failed project to take them off, I hope that does not happen to you.

Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#113

Post by pwinnski »

pwinnski wrote: post #111
birdstheword5 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. How would you compare the developer experience between the two approaches? And what was your use case?

The serverless dev experience was delightful! I'd work on a single lambda, or maybe a "stack" of related lambdas, and each was focused and lean. A serverless approach is also probably-necessarily a microservices approach, which removes a lot of complication. It was in EdTech, so we had students downloading assignments, uploading results (lambda-fronted S3 for blob storage, DynamoDB for data), administrators paging th…

I will say, if you don't have a great architect at the top level, and support from DevOps, you end up with miserable experiences like the negative stuff I see here.

Well, some of it seems to be assumptions, but I believe the negative experiences, I just think they lacked a great architect.

Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#114

Post by rozenmd »

Depending on your business's "economics", serverless can be decent for MVPs/projects where you're not sure you'll become popular.

For my own project (uptime monitoring + status pages), I got to about 500 users before serverless costs were eating enough of my profits to make me want to move to VMs. It was nice to be able to validate the idea on a service that costs zero if no one is using it.

With continuously running applications (100 concurrent users), it makes zero sense to use serverless as you're paying a high premium over a continuously running VM. I'd just use a VM and scale the number of instances serving the API.

Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#115

Post by ovao »

minimaul wrote: post #98
nadieyninguno1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Very very low traffic apps. POST hooks for Slack bots, etc.. Works well! I would add, that it offers an extension point / hook-in for a variety of AWS products. I can add custom functions to be called when a Cognito user is created, updated. I can add custom functions to be called to authorize routes transiting API Gateway. At "The Firm" - we're going heavily in on AWS for our architecture - Fargate for k8s on to…

We use Lambda to handle lots of scale-out tasks & extensions to AWS services too - it works really well for this. For example: - resizing images - we can do a size per lambda all in parallel. This means we can process images quickly (with minimal latency) without having to have loads of slack memory & CPU on our backends - queue processing - we have an app that needs to copy files from user provided URLs to S3. We do…

To add a couple more good use cases for Lambda:

- To run something at deploy-time with custom CloudFormation resources. As an example, a Lambda can be invoked during each deployment to run tests. If the test fails, the stack(s) can be automatically rolled back. Tricky to get right and not often the right tool in the bag, but sometimes useful.

- As handlers for CloudWatch events. Useful for forwarding events to third-party log services, or for taking some sort of complex action based on a given event.

AWS is nearly “all in” on Lambda at this point, so it’s a good bet that if you want to hang some kind of task off an AWS service, they’ll give you a hook to fire off a Lambda. From a cost and simplicity perspective this works out well.

Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#116

Post by ManWith2Plans »

adameasterling wrote: post #103
intrasight wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>GCP has a better serverless offering I am starting to evaluate AWS for GCP for serverless. What, in your opinion, makes GCP better? Is the comment in the context of containers or functions?

I have limited time before my next meeting so I'll type real quick: GCP Cloud Run is like the best of both worlds between AWS ECS Fargate and AWS Lambda. (Yes, the comment is in the context of containers. Sort of.) * Like Fargate, Cloud Run hosts containers and takes care of figuring out where they actually live. Unlike Fargate, you don't have to say exactly how many containers you want running at once; GCP will auto…

A couple of points: 1. Cloud Run is more analogous to AWS App Runner than Fargate. 2. Cloud Run isn't a great analog to lambda. Lambda is built to host functions. Cloud Run is built to host applications. Lambda is more analogous to GCP Functions. 3. Cloud Tasks should probably be built with EventBridge + Lambda or EventBridge + StepFunctions or EventBridge + ECS.

I don't profess to be a GCP expert so it's hard for me to make a judgement call on what's better. I can, however, say that most of this post ignores some of the real serverless power provided by AWS. AWS AppSync, AWS API Gateway, DynamoDB, CloudFront Functions, Lambda@Edge. It also makes comparisons that are not very fair.

Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#117

Post by decide1000 »

When we migrated our API to Google Cloud Functions we had a major rise in costs. Reason: idle time is billed. Meaning every connection to the outside world like a GET request or some other api will become costly. This is not a problem when you have a light api. We had 30-500 concurrent connections and after the first week our bill was already USD 500 higher as usual.

Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#118

Post by adameasterling »

spiffytech wrote: post #89
adameasterling wrote: post #25

This is from the perspective of a small startup CTO: We've used AWS Lambda for about 4 years, and it's been so good and so cheap that I'm shifting literally everything (except Redis) to serverless. Also, GCP has a better serverless offering (Cloud Run, Spanner), so we're switching from AWS to GCP to take advantage of that. I bet we're going to see a massive cost reduction, but we'll see. Things I like about serverles…

Does your team do local dev? Every team I've known that adopted Lambda + DynamoDB (or equivalents) gave up on running their app locally, adding a lot of friction to the development process.

Within Lambda, yes, sucks. This is why container-based serverless is so much more exciting. (Which Cloud Run offers.)

I'm in the early stages of this rearchitecture but so far I've had no difficulty with local development.

Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#119

Post by hbrn »

johngalt wrote: post #110
hbrn wrote: post #61

Any "architect" joining the company and pushing for drastic changes like that is either an idiot chasing the hype, or a malicious actor trying to boost their importance. Good news: your gut feeling is correct. Bad news: you will likely lose this battle, unless you're good at playing company politics. Here's how it typically goes: 1. A new lead/architect/manager joins the company. 2. They push for a new hyped technolo…

How to derail this dynamic early: "Does this solve a problem we have?" "Of the top five things that we are trying to build, does this add any of them?" Often the problem isn't that the new methods/tech is bad but that all the effort spent transitioning to it could be better spent directly attacking the goal in the first place.

I wish it was that easy.

"Of course it does: engineers will be more productive, we'll have less bugs and better performance. {TECHNOLOGY} has been around for {N} years and getting more and more traction. Do you want us to be ahead of our competitors or not?"

"You need to understand that sometimes you have to sharpen your axe before cutting the trees. Have you heard the phrase 'work smart, not hard'?"

"So essentially you're saying we shouldn't change anything despite having issues (bring up any bug/downtime you had recently). John, sometimes you have to escape the comfort zone and learn new technology."

I once worked with a person who talked like this in front of non-technical founder. I bet he did sound quite convincing, it took me a while to cut through the bullshit.

Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?

#120

Post by ReflectedImage »

suzzer99 wrote: post #51
DogLover_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree about developing/debugging being harder. People advocating for Serverless secretly ignore this and focus on scaleability and pricing. I have worked at two places using Serverless and in those places setting up a local environment was not possible. Instead I have to deploy to a test environment to try things out. It is such a slow workflow.

We use AWS Lambda with serverless.com. I can deploy a single lambda change to our dev environment in about 5 seconds. I can also edit directly through the AWS console if I want to experiment. I've never wanted for a local environment.

5 seconds is way too slow
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