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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?

#141

Post by larrik »

jedberg wrote: post #88
larrik wrote: post #86

Lots of different opinions here, but: My company has moved several "regular" websites to serverless. In fact, we just took the existing websites (which were often Django, sometimes huge ones) and dumped them into Lambda. The exact opposite of every "what serverless architectures are for" article you've ever read. And you know what? It's awesome. It's way cheaper than running it on EC2, and I never have to reboot a se…

Did you just dump the entire app into a single Lambda? I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to turn Django apps into services, but it never occurred to me that it could just make sense to dump the whole app in there.

Yes, that is exactly what we did.

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

#142

Post by hbrn »

willio58 wrote: post #77
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…

This has been my experience so far too. Serverless is amazing, it does require some shift in thought when it comes to backend architecture but once you get there it really does provide everything it promises. Less cost, less complexity (if done right), and the scalability is amazing. I agree it's not perfect but I highly recommend any backend or fullstack dev take a look at if you haven't already. Been working on a l…

Can you expand a bit on complexity part? How exactly serverless reduces it?

The only thing that comes to mind better isolation between parts of the app, but this could be achieved with any architecture if done right.

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

#143

Post by liveoneggs »

SahAssar wrote: post #140
liveoneggs wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

config drift

What do you mean?

By duplicating and distributing parts of your app into a bunch of distributed targets you will, eventually, accumulate drift in assumptions about your environment/partners/libraries/databases/etc

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

#144

Post by SahAssar »

liveoneggs wrote: post #143
SahAssar wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean?

By duplicating and distributing parts of your app into a bunch of distributed targets you will, eventually, accumulate drift in assumptions about your environment/partners/libraries/databases/etc

Right, so that is an argument against outsourcing low-traffic stuff to a serverless runtime, right?

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

#145

Post by idunno246 »

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…

this falls in line with how i feel about cloud run, it really feels like a much better abstraction than ecs/gke or functions. it also is more similar to how most devs currently work, and local dev is the same. for non-api based traffic, like queues, it has some really weird quirks, like the autoscaler is problematic. but our experience with gcp in general has ranged from mediocre to bad, where the tech seems cool but things dont quite fit together

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

#146

Post by intrasight »

adameasterling wrote: post #130
ManWith2Plans wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Huh. I had this long call with our AWS Account Reps (+ Support Engineers) the other day and no one mentioned App Runner! This is the first I've heard of it. Looking at it now. Ah I see, launched originally in May 2021. That's probably why they weren't aware of it. Yes, this looks cool. Very much what I was looking for. The differences that I can see are... * AWS App Runner lacks an advertised free tier. Not a big dea…

I know this is an old thread now, but I just came back to it and thought to dig in a bit. First thing my Googling hit was this, which provides a good comparison of App Runner and Fargate

https://cloudonaut.io/fargate-vs-apprunner/

That lack of WAF support stood out. So Googling that:

https://github.com/aws/apprunner-roadmap/issues/58

"Hello, we are looking at supporting WAF in App Runner and will have more updates on this thread going forward. "

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

#147

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

happymellon wrote: post #109
thundergolfer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless I had a compelling reason to use containers AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions support containers. > and would be long running. Unless it's running 24/7, you're better of with serverless batch processing systems or you'll need scale-to-zero on your Kubernetes cluster.

I completely agree with you, and I didn't think that anything I said contradicted you. Lamba works really well for reactive processing, such as supporting an API. You lose that benefit if you deal with something like Java because of the slow startup times gimps the processes. Hence, running it in an environment which will be on constantly with consistent throughput that is just a pipeline 24/7. The scenario I've used…

Do you happen to have a list of languages with lower startup times? I was trying to figure out what would work well for serverless development

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

#148

Post by XCSme »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #66
prottog wrote: post #9

> all our web apps that are currently deployed in Azure App Services/ VMs What problem does migrating to a new architecture solve? Does the current deployment have scaling, maintenance, or other troubles? Going from something that's broken to something that works is one thing, but going from something that works to something else that works is pointless unless there are tangible benefits. If the only reason is to mak…

Yes, they might try a pilot project to see if cost savings are substantial enough to continue.

Can't they just calculate/estimate it?

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

#149

Post by ThePadawan »

danielvaughn wrote: post #52
ThePadawan wrote: post #13

> The consensus on the internet seems to be "serverless has its use cases" but it's not clear to me what those use cases are. My $0.02, having used serverless before. Those use cases are: * Very very low traffic apps. POST hooks for Slack bots, etc.. Works well! * Someone who is an "architect" can now put "experience with Serverless" on their CV and get hired somewhere else that is looking for that keyword in their C…

100%. Someone set up serverless at my last freelance company. Just due to the cold start, our network requests were averaging SIX seconds. This was even for requests that were just getting basic config stuff, i.e. no DB transactions required. Insanity.

The project I was working on at the time replaced an Excel sheet in the order of hundreds of MB. The users were used to performance being miserable, so no one cared if an API request took two seconds.

I am an old school kind of engineer, and if you tell me your web requests take 2s instead of 20ms due to an architectural decision you made that doesn't have any other strong upsides, I would agree that that is insanity.

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

#150

Post by willio58 »

hbrn wrote: post #142
willio58 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience so far too. Serverless is amazing, it does require some shift in thought when it comes to backend architecture but once you get there it really does provide everything it promises. Less cost, less complexity (if done right), and the scalability is amazing. I agree it's not perfect but I highly recommend any backend or fullstack dev take a look at if you haven't already. Been working on a l…

Can you expand a bit on complexity part? How exactly serverless reduces it? The only thing that comes to mind better isolation between parts of the app, but this could be achieved with any architecture if done right .

We don’t have to manage a server, that’s really the drop in complexity. We just write a function and it runs on a machine somewhere in the cloud. As we scale, AWS just handles it automatically. If the demand decreases, no problem. We just pay for what we use. Of course there are ways to handle scale with servers, but with serverless you barely have to think about it.
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