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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?

#131

Post by suralind »

Since there's a lot of good comments here, can someone suggest if what I'm suggesting to do in the company I work for is a good idea?

We run a lot of services in Kubernetes, some of those services also run background jobs (same container serving both HTTP and doing bg processing). I want us to migrate background jobs from our containers to a dedicated platform (e.g. Lambdas), because we can scale to 0 when not needed, we'll offload our Kubernetes cluster (our cluster will serve only HTTP traffic that is easy to scale for us) and if done right, we should have better debuggability/observability. Also right now we orchestrate our jobs with redis which means we need a redis instance for each service with bg jobs, but I want to move orchestration to a separate service that will store the data in postgres so instead of running x redis clusters we'll just have 1 postgres.

The tricky thing is the rewrite, but frankly, we still need to do it and we don't need to rewrite whole services, just the code responsible for bg jobs.

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

#133

Post by liveoneggs »

SahAssar wrote: post #126
jethro_tell wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's tons of low traffic parts of apps. So if you're building in more of a 'microservice' architecture instead of a giant monolith, serverless has it's place. Most of your app is serving requests to users, but your signup and login flows might only run 100's of times per day and they are simple workflows, check if user exists > create new users > add password > send email verification. Then, the email verification…

If the load is so minimal for those functions and you are already running other infra for the rest of your app why would you "outsource" those functions to a serverless runtime? What do you gain besides another system you deploy to?

config drift

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

#134

Post by thunky »

filoleg wrote: post #102
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…

> 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. Or, which seems more likely, but still just as bad - someone chasing the "successfully redesigned the infrastructure on a scale of the entire company" on their promo packet and resume. Whether it actually improved the infrastructure is of no concer…

> someone chasing the "successfully redesigned the infrastructure on a scale of the entire company" on their promo packet and resume.

Also don't underestimate someone that is smart and well intentioned but dangerously overconfident and completely unaware.

These may be the toughest for manager types to sniff out because they believe their own hype.

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

#135

Post by hutzlibu »

hbrn wrote: post #119
johngalt wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those quotes ain't generally bullshit. They are general and generic pieces wisdom - but of course, whether they are really wise, depends on the actual technology and the actual product and the actual problems.

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

#136

Post by peelle »

Some of the comments below are talking about how to successfully argue against the move. Does your company have some history you can point out? We've had enough of these type guys and their failed space ship projects that any proposal for a language shift, or major framework adoption is viewed with skepticism first.

We've dealt with "new guy wants to overhaul ..." scenario. When I joined this company we were a C++ shop with some Perl and bash. Multiple new recruits successfully lobbied to implement refactors, or new projects in a hot language/framework. Several of the refactors were a huge waste of resources that either didn't come to fruition, or were only partially successful.

Now, we are a Perl shop with active development in 3 other languages(not counting front end), and we're maintaining legacy apps in an additional 4 languages. And we've deprecated apps in at least 3 additional languages.

I guess I should be thankful none of them have lobbied for switching databases. :-O On any given year, we average 3-4 programmers and 2-4 contractors(mostly front end) Two of us have been there 15+ years, but the other full timers seem to move on around the three year mark. Because of that all the hot shots have left. When a major bug is discovered in their code it can take a long time to fix, and any breakage due to upgrades is quite a hassle since those of us left aren't experts at every language we have to maintain.

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

#138

Post by pranabgohain »

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…

Couldn't agree more on the experience of developing on serverless. And you're quite on point, about the need for a good architect who can solve most of these issues.

I know a lot of EdTech startups who are primarily serverless at massive scale.

Along with a DevOps team, an Observability tool like KloudMate will go a long way in managing serverless stacks.

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

#140

Post by SahAssar »

liveoneggs wrote: post #133
SahAssar wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the load is so minimal for those functions and you are already running other infra for the rest of your app why would you "outsource" those functions to a serverless runtime? What do you gain besides another system you deploy to?

config drift

What do you mean?
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