> An Azure Cloud Architect has joined our company
The title says it all, they might as well work for Azure.
... It's likely everything is an Azure shaped nail to them, do not trust them.
Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
31–40 of 150 posts
Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
#32Serverless is good for any kind of app if you accept its pricing. You have perfect scalability, you have perfect availability.
The question is: what alternative to do you propose. How does your alternative reduces hardware when load is low. How does your alternative orders more hardware when load is high. How much time does it take? What's your plan if your data center is cut from the Internet because of bad router configuration?
A proper alternative for serverless is Kubernetes cluster. It'll likely cost less (for big application) but it'll require more knowledge to properly manage it.
You can use simplistic setup with dedicated server or virtual machines with manual operations, but at your load I'd consider that not appropriate.
Anyway is management decided to hire Azure Cloud Architect, the decision is already taken and I suggest you to relax and enjoy new experience.
Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
#33This 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…
>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?
Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
#34One big question is: do those API implementations keep any state between requests in RAM or is all the state in the front-end and/or database? If there is no local state than serverless is a feasible solution, if not the best. If there is then you need to find some substitute for that local state and the case for serverless is much worse.
Some api routes do caching - right now this is using Asp.net core's in memory cache. He recommended redis to replace this. I feel that it's a bit overkill
Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
#35This 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…
AWS Lambda supports shipping your Lambdas as containers now. Very nice experience.
Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
#36I’ve had good success using lambda and functions for analytics data pipelines. It allows a team of python developers to focus on the business logic instead of the infrastructure. On my current project we’ve been struggling with K8 for months (not our decision) and I intend to push for a refactor to functions as soon as we get to MVP.
Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
#37Having maintained a service that uses Lambda. I think Lambda is probably fine for one-shot tasks, or taking from a queue (which is what it was built for), but I would never use it for API endpoints.
The main issues: 1. Unpredictable performance - latency (with cold start), concurrency limits (how quickly can we scale to X concurrent requests), etc? We spent many hours with AWS support before moving away from lambda. 2. Short running process are terrible in many ways - no DB connection pooling, no in memory cache.
I'd be much more happy if AWS fixed scale-up speed of ECS tasks so you can scale up your services in a reasonable time, than having these one-shot tasks.
Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
#38> 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…
In AWS that post hooks workflow also is usually "firehose" apis such as events from table writes, and they work well for streaming ETL type work.
Lambdas and workflows are like SQS and workflows. you get a few of them just use lambdas and workflows, you have a lot of them switch to a workflow engine.
Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
#39Ride the wave, you'll have nice horror stories to tell later. Just don't get attached to company and don't work late.
If the architect has taken the reins for this project, I think this will be OP’s best bet. Nearly all of the other comments on this post indicate that this plan will end badly (given what we have been told), so best be prepared to land when it all falls apart. Start the job search now.
Re: Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
#40Nothing. You should be. For any serious workload it will be wayyyy more expensive than an RI running a vm or ecs/eks running a container or two. It will also perform worse most likely or at least be less consistent.