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GitLab Serverless

about.gitlab.com

31–40 of 126 posts

Re: GitLab Serverless

#31
post #17

Can someone explain me what that hype about serverless is? As I understand it, serverless is just good old webhosting, but in the cloud. With webhosting I mean providers offering a LAMP-environment and customer just upload their code and don't manage anything else. Is this correct? Then how is serverless different to this?

With serverless you only pay for a request and you (almost) don't care about scaling. While non-serverless implies that you have to manage how many server instances you want, and have them running and pay for them even if you have no traffic.

I feel the whole "not paying for underused server" argument is pointless when a serverless solution is way more expensive than paying for an idle server.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#32
post #18

Can someone explain me what that hype about serverless is? As I understand it, serverless is just good old webhosting, but in the cloud. With webhosting I mean providers offering a LAMP-environment and customer just upload their code and don't manage anything else. Is this correct? Then how is serverless different to this?

People abuse the term serverless, yes to mean "cloud" or "somebody else server" and "just write the function you want we will find a server to run it on and report to you the result". The term I like to associate with serverless is all peer-to-peer, not client-server architecture, for example any datwebsite, on datproject, and any zsite on zeronet. There you dont have a server, really, a zite is a peer in a torrent s…

This is not what "serverless" means nowadays.

What "serverless" means, in the context of the article (and basically how anyone uses it today), is "AWS Lambda" (or FaaS). The name is kinda stupid, since it still uses servers; it's just that you don't need to care about them and scaling is done magically by Amazon.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#33
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With serverless you only pay for a request and you (almost) don't care about scaling. While non-serverless implies that you have to manage how many server instances you want, and have them running and pay for them even if you have no traffic.

Just like old shared webhosting :)

Most webhosting plans are fixed monthly fees, AFAIK. The only one I knew that billed for used resources was NearlyFreeSpeech.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#34
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With serverless you only pay for a request and you (almost) don't care about scaling. While non-serverless implies that you have to manage how many server instances you want, and have them running and pay for them even if you have no traffic.

Also, you don't need to worry about server security or server setup outside of the code you're running. With a typical VPS, you'd have to install software updates yourself and have a plan for how to set up a server from scratch again if needed (nontrivial if you do a lot of setup manually over SSH). Essentially, a good way to set something up that requires minimal maintenance.

They were talking about Webhosting, not VPSs. With webhosting, the hosting company usually manages the software, you just dump your code (or cgi-bin binary) into a directory. For example https://www.hostgator.com/web-hosting

Re: GitLab Serverless

#35
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are coming up with your ow definition of serverless. For most people serverless means 1. Per invocation billing 2. No need to provision resources ahead of time Taking AWS's example 1. EC2 is not serverless but Lambda is 2. RDS is not serverless but Aurora Serverless is.

It's not their own definition, this was the default definition just a few years ago.

People started to use the term for something else and now it became the main meaning.

"Serverless" is nowadays "AWS Lambda" (and similar products).

I wish people called it FaaS (function as a service), but they call it "serverless", and it's fine I guess

Re: GitLab Serverless

#36
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not their own definition, this was the default definition just a few years ago.

People started to use the term for something else and now it became the main meaning. "Serverless" is nowadays "AWS Lambda" (and similar products). I wish people called it FaaS (function as a service), but they call it "serverless", and it's fine I guess

Yeah, now the term is an oxymoron, "serverless" but there is a server and a client.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#37

Can someone explain me what that hype about serverless is? As I understand it, serverless is just good old webhosting, but in the cloud. With webhosting I mean providers offering a LAMP-environment and customer just upload their code and don't manage anything else. Is this correct? Then how is serverless different to this?

[deleted]

Re: GitLab Serverless

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does feel like just FTPing a .php file into your LAMP webhost, but with autoscaling, slicker UX and much more vendor lock-in.

With the difference that you pay per request instead of per month / year. Mind you, given how cheap LAMP webhosts can be, I'm fairly sure they would be cheaper if you don't need the autoscaling.

Seriously, VPS hosts are so far ahead of the cloud when it comes to cost/resource ratio. I can get a 4-core 4GB 120GB SHDD instance for ~$2/month.

https://lowendbox.com/blog/hostedsimply-4gb-ram-ssd-cached-v...

EDIT: cheaper even, $1.58/month:

https://lowendbox.com/blog/n3servers-vps-hosting-and-hybrid-...

Re: GitLab Serverless

#39

Serverless functions are a terrible idea. Way too restrictive and proprietary. Kubernetes is the future. Amazon throwing money behind the Serverless trend is only delaying the inevitable universal success of a standardized, open source container orchestration platform.

Your argument against serverless functions holds for AWS Lambda, but this Gitlab feature is based on Knative. That's an open source serverless platform based on Kubernetes. I think all money Amazon is throwing at serverless is to build a foundation to ultimately transform all their "managed" services into a serverless form. They already released serverless RDS ( https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/ ).

Good to know that it's open source. I should have looked it up first.

My understanding of Serverless was that it was synonymous with 'Functions as a Service'. What Knative seems to be doing is more like 'Backend as a Service'. I guess it's good to know that these two very different approaches are now both labeling themselves as 'Serverless'. I guess Knative is just hitchhiking on top of Amazon's marketing success around the 'Serverless' term.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#40
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does feel like just FTPing a .php file into your LAMP webhost, but with autoscaling, slicker UX and much more vendor lock-in.

> and much more vendor lock-in. This is a myth that really needs to be busted. There is almost no lock in with serverless. The serverless products from all the major providers are nearly identical. The lock in comes from the services you are using within a particular cloud, which you can avoid if you want to by running everything else in k8s.

regarding your k8s comment, did you mean kubeless?
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