111–120 of 164 posts
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The financial exchanges running in Java would like to disagree with your gross generalization.
Yes, but: These a highly-tuned code that starts infrequently and doesn't use GC. VMs still have a startup cost; although one could argue that it's something that can be optimized out if there's enough desire.
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…
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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…
"Heroku is useful for prototyping, not scale" Can you clarify more on this.
When you scale, you need to make your infrastructure fit your app. Not the other way around.
The only way that such a thing could be commoditized into a front-end interface is if you could devise an interface that allowed for all the different kinds of questions that will be asked, the ways they will change, the new features that will be wanted -- because most of the work is taking some backend pipeline that is already optimized for being able to answer questions of type X, and then figuring out how to generalize it without losing any performance in order to also answer questions of type Y.
It's almost always highly specialized to the specific company and line of business involved, so consulting companies can pop up to take away some of the in-house work, but in general there is no conceivable "as-a-service" thing that could.
Thus, you're left with needing to manage your own backend, probably for quite a long time to come.
Finance, ML for search interfaces, small-data statistics consulting (like political statistics, ecology, and other fields), education analytics, and many other fields offer work that falls into these categories.
Basically, anywhere that there is a business or domain science researcher that needs ad hoc computer programs whose lives as programs will generally only serve to answer scientific questions for that researcher. The ad hoc nature of how the questions change most often mean that no service that pretends to put a front-end API over top of the science questions can adequately capture the variety of things that are needed, especially once the further need to heavily optimize them is added in.
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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…
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
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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…
"Heroku is useful for prototyping, not scale" Can you clarify more on this.
Everyone leaves Heroku eventually. :D
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As someone that knows how to set up a server, I found Heroku a lot more difficult to get a Django app running than on a "normal" server. And a lot more of a PITA to debug.
What about the second time you ran a Django app on Heroku? But Heroku is not even in `mabbo's first course (maybe the appetizer?) so that's slightly a straw man.
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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…
>So much of backend work is redundant True, but that's been the case for 10 or 15 years now. Most of the applications we develop are just CRUD applications... with a twist. There seems to always be some detail that prevents you from having a generic backend. I mean look at something like SAP. It's an off the self application, it pretty much contains everything you'd imagine needing for running a large business. Yet e…
The backend can't truly go away because it's always going to be managed by somebody, AWS, App Engine, Azure, etc. From the developers point of view though, running systems on these platforms could be made easier to implement and run to the point of being effortless.
I didn't mean to suggest tossing out server side validation. Though now that you mention it, if you wanted to, you could just toss every request into Hadoop, it's not polluting your data because the metadata associated with it indicates each is a request, and nothing more. When it gets to be too much, you could flush it, or do whatever you want with it.
serverless is the next big buzzword for back-end architecture
Serverless has been around for about a decade, since Heroku was founded in 2007.
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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.