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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?

#61

Post by hbrn »

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 technology/methodology.

-> you are currently here 3. The team is split: folks that love new things embrace it, folks that care hate it, rest are indifferent.

4. Because the team is split, the best politician wins (usually the new hire).

5. Switch happens and internally you know it's fucking disaster, but you're still forced celebrate it.

6. When disaster is becoming obvious people start getting thrown under the bus (usually junior engineers or folks that opposed the switch).

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

#62

Post by jedberg »

Serverless is a way to deploy code. It has its tradeoffs in cost and scaling and speed, just like anything else. Most of the advantages are in more rapid iteration and deployment, since you're forced to deploy small chunks of code at a time.

But if you have an API that is getting sustained traffic, Lambdas probably aren't your best bet -- you're going to want a container that is always running.

But to be honest, with 120 routes and 100 users, it sounds like Lambdas are a good way to go.

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

#65

Post by thundergolfer »

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.

The bad developing/debugging dev-loop is getting fixed. My team is working on a platform that fixes it, as are others in the space.

You should never need leave your IDE to complete a change>execute>change inner loop. https://modal.com/docs/guide/ex/hello_world

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

#66

Post by mixmastamyk »

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.

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

#67

Post by tra3 »

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 just started working with Lambda, so my experience may just be the teething pains, but. I find the developer experience a bit jarring. My lambda is in python, but every time I want to test my code I have to "build" the lambda with the `sam build` tool and only then can I exercise it. It takes a non-trivial amount of time to build.

The deployment story looks good though, with the `sam deploy`, but for now I can't get over the developer experience.

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

#68

Post by jmull »

> Are the apps I'm working on good use cases?

It's OK... it would work.

It could be somewhat more expensive or less expensive to host, and somewhat more or less performant. (You didn't say where the data lives, but if it's in a database and you aren't doing something extra with it, then this layer might not be that important, one way or the other.)

For a 100-user app, I'm guessing the major cost here is the switchover cost. Whether it makes sense or not depends on details of where you are now and what problem(s) this is meant to solve.

No one here knows that (maybe even you don't either?) so we can't really give you an answer, just some general pros and cons of serverless.

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