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Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#51
post #16

I was working for EllieMae, to build their cloud platform. They were not happy with the performance of the product, though it reduced ops work.

was this mostly cold starts or another architectural choice causing a bottleneck?

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#52
Listen to I just have to say this for everybody else out there there is no serverless design it's not like the fucking things running in JavaScript on the clients there are servers the whole name is stupid come up with a better name for service man it's not serverless God help us

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#53

Listen to I just have to say this for everybody else out there there is no serverless design it's not like the fucking things running in JavaScript on the clients there are servers the whole name is stupid come up with a better name for service man it's not serverless God help us

If you're going to call it serverless architecture then you better be running it on webrtc data streams over P2P clients

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#56

I can't name any names for obvious reasons or give you more hints about what industry this company is in but I just did DD on a very impressive outfit that ran their entire company on Google's cloud platform, it held about 500T of data and held up amazingly well under load. I was super impressed with how they had set this all up and they were extremely well aware of all the limitations and do's and dont's of that par…

There's a big difference between running on GCP and "serverless architecture" Did they have everything running with Google Cloud Functions?

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#57

We did. We are building our entire company: SQQUID on 100% serverless architecture. Scalability is awesome, in fact we had to do extra work to serialize some operations in order not to bring down other major corporation's server stack. Cost is a fraction of the traditional app scaling setup. The best part is no devops needed. We use Serverless Framework. The biggest downside are cold starts for frontend response time…

What would the nodeJS server be?

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#58

I have spent the last year and a half building a completely serverless production service on Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB (along with the standard auxiliary services like CW, SNS, Route53, S3, CF, X-Ray, etc.). It was a lot of work establishing new patterns for many of the operational aspects, particularly custom CW metrics and A/B deployments with Lambda traffic shifting, but in the end everything is set up nic…

Your setup, although appealing from an AWS ecosystem perspective, sounds like a bit expensive to me on a first reading. Of course everything depends on the specifics but Lambdas and DynamoDB are expensive at scale. I wonder how it compares cost-wise to a more traditional solution.

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we're serving client web traffic directly with Lambdas via API Gateway. We have no traditional instances or non-serverless components of any kind in the core stack.

So how do you store your state? I assume DynamoDB part isn't serverless.

DDB is serverless in the sense that you don't have to worry about scalability issues, but you have to worry about design issues[1] if you want to take advantage of everything DynamoDB has to offer. I find dynamo's autoscaling very problematic: It's both slow to kick-in and you can scale down 4 times in 24h, not cost-effective if you have spikes.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...

Re: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

#60
post #54

The "serverless" architecture is cool, but it irks me every time I hear the given name for it. For a marketing term mainly aimed at developers, I'm amazed they picked one so terrible.

Agreed, it doesn't make much sense hearing "serverless". Like, is data being served to a client or not?

I haven't done much reading up on it but it basically sounds like someone else is hosting and executing your code?

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