Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#61

Post by mabbo » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:04 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #41

mabbo wrote: post #21

Some people don't like the word much, but "serverless" is going to become a bigger deal. You'll write your code, complex or simple; you'll hand it off to some cloud system; you'll write a bit of configuration; you're done. Likely the configuration part will become less and less required. You won't think about hardware, scaling, load balancing, etc, it will just happen for you. The data store being used will be abstra…

This model isn't "serverless", it's PAAS. It's not much of a future. Heroku is useful for prototyping, not scale. (Edit: Doesn't mean it can't be more popular though - the web is full of prototypes) "Serverless" as in AWS Lambda has very specific use cases. The people who are serving websites on Lambda or something are not only doing it wrong, they are wasting money while locking themselves in to an architecture that…

Consider the problems that both Lambda and Containers/PaaS solve for you: ignoring infrastructure. It's there, sure, but I don't care much about it.

Now take that idea to the absolute extreme. I write code, I push it into the cloudy-cloud machine, and it's serving clients immediately.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#62

Post by caseymarquis » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:06 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #38

caseymarquis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like your framework sucks. With an orm and some sort of json serialization that's literally just: Put bagel in toaster. Update the db model. Add a migration. Update the viewmodel db model translation in relevant requests. Get bagel and butter it. Commit. Test the migration on a staging db if feeling paranoid, cause it's just adding a column. Push to master. Update production. Take last bite of bagel. If you ar…

Our framework does kind of suck... We're also not doing the common website/webapp thing, but rather on-premise enterprise software. So we have to update installers too, and be relatively paranoid about updates, because it is intensely painful when we have a bad update with one of our customers.

I feel that. We have the same deployment model and customers pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have our systems installed. When our systems go down individual companies can lose tens of thousands of dollars in an hour. More than that under some circumstances. We always test migrations thoroughly on those systems. Even simple ones.

On our less important software that'd just be a direct push to production though.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#63

Post by lucian1900 » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:07 PM UTC

jbb555 wrote: post #5

WebAssembly will not revolutionize anything. It's like java where people claim it's as fast as native code, and yet every single program runs like a dog and takes 100 times the resources. Only worse because it runs in a browser.

That has more to do with the libraries than the runtime. The JVM is very fast, but the classlib is very big and inefficient to load.

Dalvik's major advancement was faster class loading.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#64

Post by sontek » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:07 PM UTC

caseymarquis wrote: post #31

douche wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the classic "Can't you just add another checkbox here?" situation. Yes, I can add a checkbox there. But I have to add the code to include that setting in the API that the front-end calls, to give you a way to retrieve it and change it. Then I have to add code to the data access layer for this new setting. Then I have to write the SQL scripts to add columns/tables for this new setting, as well as change scripts t…

Sounds like your framework sucks. With an orm and some sort of json serialization that's literally just: Put bagel in toaster. Update the db model. Add a migration. Update the viewmodel db model translation in relevant requests. Get bagel and butter it. Commit. Test the migration on a staging db if feeling paranoid, cause it's just adding a column. Push to master. Update production. Take last bite of bagel. If you ar…

This is definitely a common use case and very valid for smaller applications. If I were you though I would avoid applying your experience on smaller scale applications as a way to say that everyone who can't do that are using bad frameworks.

Once your application reaches a certain scale there is a huge chance that generated migration could lock a table for minutes to hours which isn't acceptable.

We allow developers to run generated migrations in dev/testing environments but when its time to go to staging we evaluate the changes made and check query plans and figure out what type of locking is going to happen and how long it would take it prod. There is very few times the migrations Django or Rails generate are acceptable at our scale in production.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#65

Post by sontek » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:11 PM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #34

digitalarborist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think custom backends are going away either, I do think it will become way less prevalent then it is today though, similarly how all programs used to do manual memory management, this hasn't gone away but most programmers now rely on garbage collection. So much of backend work is redundant, login, user info management, allowing the creation of groups of users, user following, user data uploading or sharing. N…

With react native and electron web stack is running in circles. How many times should this be repeated: web stack is easier to write only if you don't know shit of the native SDKs. Otherwise it does not even compare.

Things like react-native and electron aren't becoming popular because people think they are better than writing native, they are becoming popular because of the dream of "write once, run everywhere".

Most people are already developing a webstack and if they have the ability to re-use code on their mobile/desktop apps then that is a win for everyone. If you are writing 100% mobile app then you probably aren't reaching for react-native.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#66

Post by nol13 » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:11 PM UTC

pauljaworski wrote: post #7

When I started building out the back-end of my latest project, I realized its only purpose was to persist data to a NoSQL database. I had a small epiphany and decided I didn't need to build a server at all - I could just use something like Firebase to accomplish that task. Now that I'm getting deeper into the project, I need to add in features like PDF generation. No problem! I'll use microservices for that. Well, th…

That's what jsPDF is for.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#67

Post by mabbo » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:16 PM UTC

tachion wrote: post #55

mabbo wrote: post #21

Some people don't like the word much, but "serverless" is going to become a bigger deal. You'll write your code, complex or simple; you'll hand it off to some cloud system; you'll write a bit of configuration; you're done. Likely the configuration part will become less and less required. You won't think about hardware, scaling, load balancing, etc, it will just happen for you. The data store being used will be abstra…

What does the fact that developers are expensive has in common with infrastructure/ops? You mean that developers shouldn't be working on it? I couldn't agree more, just like I wouldn't like my dentist being my heart surgeon! Developers should write the code, but they should not be doing infrastructure nor operations, and they should not enforce some 'serverless' utopia on projects/situations where pure infrastructure…

Depends on where you work. If you're a three-nan start up, you don't have an infrastructure or ops team. You do everything.

As well, companies who have dedicated infrastructure teams are wasting money when we reach a world where that problem is purely automated. And that's where I think we're going.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#68

Post by fermuch » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:16 PM UTC

Keats wrote: post #59

paulftw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People host their blogs on AWS lambda for less than dollar per month [1] compared to "standard" $5 or so for VPS. How's that a waste of money? Docker and containers are also a paradigm change, but the world seem to have adopted it just fine. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11644042

That link looks it's S3 doing the hosting and a lambda function only for contact forms, not hosting the blog on Lambda.

You're still paying only a few cents.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#69

Post by sontek » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:18 PM UTC

jbb555 wrote: post #5

WebAssembly will not revolutionize anything. It's like java where people claim it's as fast as native code, and yet every single program runs like a dog and takes 100 times the resources. Only worse because it runs in a browser.

I'm not a java developer but I find this generalization pretty ignorant (sorry... I don't mean this in an insulting way... maybe misinformed is a better word?).

The JVM is an extremely fast system and if you run java on top of it that is fine. There is a reason so many of the world changing distributed systems (Cassandra, Kafka, ZooKeeper, etc) are built on top of it.

I believe what you are thinking of our java business systems which are usually bloated/slow and developed by similar developers who think backends can be automated.

There is trade-offs on both cases, if you can optimize for developer speed and sacrifice app performance that might be fine for your use-case. Software applies to pretty much every industry and not everyone needs scale but not everyone can live with poor performance either.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#70

Post by collyw » Fri, Aug 12, 2016, 1:20 PM UTC

alex_duf wrote: post #11

serverless is the next big buzzword for back-end architecture

Buzzwords. Having checked a few threads on here and looked at the descriptions I have concluded that "serverless" is basically the pricing model. (The code runs on a server doesn't it?)