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DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

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Re: DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

#31
post #28

I realized recently that Serverless is to developers as credit cards are to college students. Remember when VMs came out, and people were like, great! Now I can constrain the resources of my OS! I can run 10 OSes on one machine! I'll save so much money ! Then we gave individual teams access to create as many VMs as they wanted, and suddenly all the hardware was used up. Now do that, but in the cloud, with unlimited r…

In my experience, those VMs were used briefly then left to rot. Consuming a large reserve of resources while doing nothing. Serverless should at least reduce the overhead of orphaned projects out there.

There's a secondary problem: when there are more resources, application development becomes less efficient over time. Even though there will be less infrequently used resources, the applications will use up resources more frequently in an inefficient way.

Example: I now need a minimum of 4GB RAM to browse the web, which is insane. 15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at approximately the same rate.

Re: DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue But "Functions as a Service" doesn't cover what it is, though. The following AWS services are "serverless" but would not be "function as a service:" * S3 * API Gateway * SQS * SNS * Cognito * DynamoDB * CloudWatch (logs and metrics) * Step Functions In all cases, you are no…

All of those would fall under IaaS/PaaS. If we're qualifying anything on a server that developers don't have to manage themselves as serverless than anything with an API becomes serverless...despite all of them actually running on servers.

OK. I guess to me categorizing those things in the same bucket as EC2 or Salesforce is missing a pretty fundamental architectural difference and benefit. I'm not claiming "serverless" is an ideal term, but I haven't seen the case made for anything better.

Re: DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

#33
post #20
post #12

Like the Stack Overflow survey, this one does not distinguish server-side/client-side JavaScript, making it look far more popular than it actually is when considering the data in context of server-side technologies. If 100% of the servers were running PHP, the results would likely be 50% PHP, 50% JavaScript. These survey writers need to modify their question, or add another one specifically requesting server-side tec…

Do you think a lot of people are running JS in a container for frontend? I wouldn't consider a webserver container a "JS container", even it were mostly serving a React/Vue/Angular app. By the way it's worded, it sounds like the question is specifically talking about NodeJS.

> Do you think a lot of people are running JS in a container for frontend?

Hold my beer. --Frontend developers

Re: DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

#35
post #18

> Serverless computing is in a much earlier stage of adoption, with nearly half of developers failing to clearly understand what it is. I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue because 1) it clearly communicates what it is 2) there's not actually such thing as serverless since the functions are still running on serv…

"/cgi-bin/ Rides Again" was left on the cutting-room floor.

I see people getting excited about something new "past REST"... which by that what they mean is RPC.

Re: DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

#36
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty hard to gauge the quality of management from the outset though.

I'm curious why you think so? I normally ask questions about various non-tech topics including conflict resolution, team makeup, strategy, product management priorities, how they mentor junior team members, etc. Those discussions may not be able to tell the difference between a good vs. great leader, but they absolutely will raise red flags from a bad leader.

I disagree. Many bad leaders are very expert at sounding like good leaders in a way that is hard to detect in precisely this type of situation. There’s really only two options: seek advice from someone you trust who worked with those leaders, or else you just have to spend a bit of time working for them to find out. You cannot tell from interview questions, unfortunately.

Re: DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

#37

> Serverless computing is in a much earlier stage of adoption, with nearly half of developers failing to clearly understand what it is. I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue because 1) it clearly communicates what it is 2) there's not actually such thing as serverless since the functions are still running on serv…

> I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue But "Functions as a Service" doesn't cover what it is, though. The following AWS services are "serverless" but would not be "function as a service:" * S3 * API Gateway * SQS * SNS * Cognito * DynamoDB * CloudWatch (logs and metrics) * Step Functions In all cases, you are no…

None of those are "serverless"

Re: DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

#38
post #9

Has anyone chosen digital ocean over aws/gcp/aZure when building a scalable setup (for pricing reasons). Eg setting up your own load balancers/ private master slave dB machines / bunch of ansible to organize it all.

Fwiw, Digital Ocean keeps adding more and more options on the service front. Several storage options, load balancers w/ Let's Encrypt built in, etc. Keeps growing. IMO the biggest gap for them is lack of a database service like RDS. There are providers of that service that can be deployed to DO...but the cost of those providers is high enough to disincentivize the price appeal of DO in the first place. It would be re…

Lack of GPU droplets is also a big gap, and something that has been promised for several years now.

Re: DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

#39
The pool of respondents are Digital Ocean customers? I'm assuming that would exclude employees of FAANG plus basically all really large "enterprise" businesses. Is that fair to assume?

If that is fair, I wonder how biased these results are. If we included FAANG and/or big corporations where tech is key but not a cultural staple (e.g. Walmart) I wonder what the results would look like.

Re: DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud

#40
Something that puzzled me:

"the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between bootcamp vs. college graduates"

While the bulk of work at a lot of enterprises (banks, telcos, etc) are CRUD apps with some BPM, I did not expect a (hiring) manager to be unable to make such a simple distinction.

Hopefully it could be the case that 'we don't discriminate based on that' is simply the polite/legal thing to say, especially considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...

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