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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?

#131

Post by thepratt »

I have some python based lambdas for simple service/user story monitoring. The couple problems I have with lambdas, which mean I will _never_ use them for a proper application:

- The language choices available do not meet my needs - Impossible to create a prod-like setup; all our services run on k8, so mini-kube works great locally - You lose any sort of control over architectural decisions (for better or worse) - Poor code structure/quality/re-usability leads into poor developer experience. I enjoy most new technologies I pick up, all I got from Lambda was frustration.

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

#132

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

k__ wrote: post #113
jonathan-kosgei wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We're starting to ramp up traffic now by orders of magnitude (with many more to come) and it's soooooo awesome knowing the stack is pretty much bombproof. This does come with additional cost. Serverless pricing doesn't scale, your costs increase linearly with your usage, and there're no discounts for bulk usage or reserved pricing. We were recently on the receiving end of a massive HTTP GET Flood DDoS and although w…

I read in many places that you should limit your max parallel executions.

We were wary of limiting paid users. Even with lambda's max concurrent function executions limit, when the function completes in a few milliseconds, the number of invocations per second can still be high.

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

#133

Post by IshKebab »

twistedpair wrote: post #102

@ mabl (mabl.com) we've been running a serverless backend on Google Cloud Functions for over a year. It's handled 600M function calls/month without much trouble. Our findings are: * Eventually you need to promote a function to legitimate service for cost savings (e.g. GCF ️ AppEngine Node service) • You need a buffer (e.g. GCF outscales services it calls) such as Pub/Sub • Multi-repo/project layout is best for deploy…

So yeah basically serverless is just too expensive. It's cheap or free for low volume, to get you hooked, but for any "serious" service it is too expensive.

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

#134

Post by jacquesm »

cagenut wrote: post #124

As an ops person this is a super interesting question, so its really kindof surreal to read dozens of replies wherein not a single one mentions throughput, tail latency, or error rate measurements.

For near realtime systems that scale it is right up there with the fastest application servers. In fact, if you take the auto-scaling properties into account it probably beats those servers because it can do it seamlessly up to incredible number of requests / sec without missing a beat. If you want low latency you can replicate your offering in as many zones as you feel like.

People start worrying about throughput, latency and error rates when they become high enough (or low enough) to measure.

My personal biggest worry is that if your Google account should die for whatever reason your company and all its data goes with it. That's the one thing that I really do not like about all this cloud business, it feels very fragile from that point of view.

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

#135

Post by jacquesm »

IshKebab wrote: post #133
twistedpair wrote: post #102

@ mabl (mabl.com) we've been running a serverless backend on Google Cloud Functions for over a year. It's handled 600M function calls/month without much trouble. Our findings are: * Eventually you need to promote a function to legitimate service for cost savings (e.g. GCF ️ AppEngine Node service) • You need a buffer (e.g. GCF outscales services it calls) such as Pub/Sub • Multi-repo/project layout is best for deploy…

So yeah basically serverless is just too expensive. It's cheap or free for low volume, to get you hooked, but for any "serious" service it is too expensive.

That just isn't true. For many companies the cost of their IT infrastructure is a very small fraction of their annual turnover. It all depends on the economics of your particular case whether or not this makes sense. For some companies it does, for some it doesn't.

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

#136

Post by k__ »

jonathan-kosgei wrote: post #132
k__ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read in many places that you should limit your max parallel executions.

We were wary of limiting paid users. Even with lambda's max concurrent function executions limit, when the function completes in a few milliseconds, the number of invocations per second can still be high.

And Shield wasn't an option?

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

#137

Post by meiraleal »

"Serverless" (by the current way it is approached) is more of the likes of "Cloud computing". Someone's server is your server. It is not difficult to create real serverless apps today, that works disconnected and fetches cached data when there is new data available.

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

#138

Post by CodeM0nkey »

_bxg1 wrote: 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.

I've heard the analagy used that "Servers are to Serverless what wires are to wireless", the main point being that they're still there, but they're no longer something you manage or directly interact with.

I'm also starting to see the term LaaS (Logic as a Service) used as an alternative to "Serverless" here and there.

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

#139

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

jacquesm wrote: post #135
IshKebab wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So yeah basically serverless is just too expensive. It's cheap or free for low volume, to get you hooked, but for any "serious" service it is too expensive.

That just isn't true. For many companies the cost of their IT infrastructure is a very small fraction of their annual turnover. It all depends on the economics of your particular case whether or not this makes sense. For some companies it does, for some it doesn't.

At some point the fixed cost of real servers does become appealing.

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

#140

Post by jonathan-kosgei »

k__ wrote: post #136
jonathan-kosgei wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were wary of limiting paid users. Even with lambda's max concurrent function executions limit, when the function completes in a few milliseconds, the number of invocations per second can still be high.

And Shield wasn't an option?

Waf would've required setting up cloudfront in front of our endpoints which would've increased latency.

Basic Shield is supposed to be on for all users but I don't think APIG is covered in the range of services covered by their Advanced Protection plan.

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