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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?

#51

Post by suzzer99 »

DogLover_ wrote: post #45
ecshafer wrote: post #14

I am not a fan of serverless computing. I am more familiar with AWS after being in a company that went all in on AWS so I will speak to those terms. I think Serverless is good in some areas, S3 and Dynamo are both good products for example. I have a few big issues with serverless: 1. It is harder to develop for. Sure you get to ignore server configuration but honestly a well made infra team should be removing that co…

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.

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

#52

Post by danielvaughn »

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.

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

#53

Post by pwinnski »

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 1ms increment. Not sure about Azure, though.

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

#54

Post by jedberg »

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…

> I'm shifting literally everything (except Redis) to serverless

A new company called Momento just launched that offers a serverless cache. Might be of interest to you.

https://www.gomomento.com

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

#55

Post by yamtaddle »

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…

The really are great for little low-to-medium-traffic web-automation scripts that are small in scope. But then you can do the same damn thing with Nginx and Lua or maybe PHP. Or anything, really. CGI exists and is wonderfully suited to exactly the same use case.

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

#56

Post by thundergolfer »

happymellon wrote: post #50
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…

After using AWS Lambda and Kubernetes for different situations, I would go for Lambda everytime unless I had a compelling reason to use containers because 99% of what people have asked for is a CRUD application. Scales down to 0, so effectively no cost overnight when used infrequently, and if you use a scripting language like Python or JavaScript the startup times are in the ms for a new instance when scaling up. Whe…

> 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.

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

#57

Post by gw98 »

Fire the astronaut architect immediately. Seriously. I couldn't fathom why the hell you'd migrate an existing application to this other than because the guy is a one trick pony who drank all the sales kool aid from cloud vendor of the hour. We had one, he's gone. We burned millions of dollars on things with no discernible ROI because someone saw some shiny poo at a conference. It becomes a religious crusade, not a sound technical decision.

Key concerns:

1. You're locking your platform into one supplier permanently. The exit fee is starting again. Literally burn it to the ground.

2. You're going to introduce problems when you migrate it. The ROI is negative if you spend money and achieve more bugs without improving functionality.

3. The cost estimation of every pure serverless platform is entirely non-deterministic. You can't estimate it at all even with calculators galore.

4. The developer story for serverless applications is quite frankly a shit show. Friction is high, administrative host is high and the tooling is usually orders of magnitude slower and more frustrating than local dev tools.

5. It's going to take time to migrate it which is time you're not working on business problems and delivering ROI to your customers.

As always ask yourself: is the customer benefiting from this now or in the future? If the answer is no or you don't know, don't do it!!!! Really sit down, find a sound business decision analysis framework and put all the variables in and watch it melt instantly.

All you're going to do here is put a "successful" (pah!) project under the architect's belt before he pisses off and trashes someone else's product.

As a somewhat extreme opposite of this, I would at this point never allow my cloud estate to progress past portable IaaS products and possibly Kubernetes control plane management. Anything else is a business risk.

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

#58

Post by suzzer99 »

tasn wrote: post #37

Having 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.…

Our app is mostly hit during business hours. So we wrote a pinger to "wake up" the back end lambdas when a user visits the website (not log in, just hit the site anywhere) *and* it's been more than 5 minutes since the last ping. It's not perfect but it helps a lot with the cold start times.

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

#59

Post by happymellon »

DogLover_ wrote: post #45
ecshafer wrote: post #14

I am not a fan of serverless computing. I am more familiar with AWS after being in a company that went all in on AWS so I will speak to those terms. I think Serverless is good in some areas, S3 and Dynamo are both good products for example. I have a few big issues with serverless: 1. It is harder to develop for. Sure you get to ignore server configuration but honestly a well made infra team should be removing that co…

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.

Odd, I've never had an issue with SAM and lets me run an API gateway, Lambda with Dynamo locally so by itself covers a lot of the usecases and LocalStack to fill in any testing gaps.

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

#60

Post by andrewf »

What are they trying to improve? Stability? Time from change request to change appearing in production? Developer velocity over time? Sometimes you'll hear things like "this will cost an extra $1000/month but make hiring and retention easier"

Operationally: You need a few more/different specifics to avoid talking in generalities. How many requests per second? What's the floor? What's the peak? How bad a sudden surge ("thundering herd") do you ever see? What's the heaviest request / worst case response time?

Then you can start comparing the two solutions under various scenarios. How much will our average RPS cost us? Will the service deal well under very low or very high load? What happens when your worst-case thundering herd hits? Does your heaviest request fit comfortably within limits?

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