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Serverless: slower and more expensive

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Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#141

Post by goatinaboat »

coldtea wrote: post #69
cryptica wrote: post #17

Finally reality is catching up to the hype. I was saying this 3 years ago. Tech should be about results, it should not be a religion. We should accept that most famous CTOs, engineers and other "thought leaders" are not geniuses (also, they're often corrupted by financial interests) and we should not outsource our decisions to them. To innovate, we need to start thinking independently and make our own rational assess…

> We should accept that most famous CTOs, engineers and other "thought leaders" are not geniuses (also, they're often corrupted by financial interests) That goes without saying! That said, serverless might be 2x slower and 8x more expensive, but all that would be irrelevant if it's e.g. 10x easier, so that e.g. 1 programmer/ops guy can do what it took 10 before. I don't think anybody uses things like AWS or serveless…

1 programmer/ops guy can do what it took 10 before.

The myth: devs are expensive and hardware is cheap

The reality: webdevs are a commodity and AWS is making record profits

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#142

Post by abiro »

missosoup wrote: post #139
abiro wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s possible to produce empirical evidence to prove or disprove this claim, but it’s just common sense: Using managed services leads to writing less code and minimizing devops work, both resulting in more time for feature development that takes less time overall and produces higher quality service (latency, availability, etc). Then there is the added benefit of clear financial insight into the inner wo…

> but it’s just common sense No. There's nothing common sense about it. It only seems plausible if you read the sales brochure from a cloud vendor and have no experience with all the weird and whacky failure modes of these systems and the fact that none of the major selling points of serverless actually work as advertised unless you dedicate significant engineering time to make them work - as the GP comment has demon…

> Serverless only makes sense if you have a fairly trivial problem

That’s exactly the point. The web application needs of most startups are fairly trivial and best supported by a serverless stack. Put it another way: If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago, then it’s serverless today.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#143

Post by LunaSea »

philliphaydon wrote: post #126
LunaSea wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Serverless is specifically a stateless paradigm, making testing easier than persistent paradigms. No because Lambdas are proprietary which means you can't run it in a CI or locally. Also, it becomes stateful if it pulls data from a database, S3 or anywhere else on AWS which it almost always does. > Serverless isn't much younger than say, node.js and Rust are. AWS Lambdas which I consider to be the first widely used…

> No because Lambdas are proprietary which means you can't run it in a CI or locally. Also, it becomes stateful if it pulls data from a database, S3 or anywhere else on AWS which it almost always does. Lambda is a function call. So it makes no difference if it’s proprietary or not. Are you saying that it’s difficult to test passing an object to a function and asserting that it’s functioning as intended?

Lambas are not simple functions because your environment is different in local compared to production.

If I run a Node.js function in AWS Lambda, my Node.js version might be different, my dependencies might be different, the OS is different, the filesystem is different, so I or one of my node_modules might be able to write to /tmp but not elsewhere, etc.

It's the reason people started using Docker really. If you don't have the same environment, you can't call it reproducible or testable for that matter.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#144

Post by neuronic »

It's concerning how typical the hype machine is in IT. I believe Serverless has its place and value. So does Kubernetes or many other products that are often discussed on HN.

But let's be clear, we are talking about commercial products and there is a capital interest in selling these services to all of us devs and engineers.

So while use cases exists and benefits wait to be reaped, as a consultant I strongly feel that we should be MUCH more insistent in pointing out when a product does not make sense instead of jumping onto the hype train.

I am basically surrounded by "LETS TRANSFORM EVERYTHING TO KUBERNETES THIS WEEK!" exclamations, conferences are basically "DID YOU ALREADY HEAR ABOUT KUBERNETES?" and so on ...

It reminds me of Ruby on Rails, a mature and well-developed framework used by global tech firms (correct me if wrong: Airbnb, ~Stack Overflow~, Github) to handle parts of their backend in 2019. But for half a decade now even tiny companies have been screaming around about FancyHTTPTechThisYear (tm) because scale while reporting 1/500th of the traffic of some famous Rails users.

This is not engineering with objectives in mind, it's more akin to the gaming community yelling for a new console.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#145

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

LunaSea wrote: post #143
philliphaydon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No because Lambdas are proprietary which means you can't run it in a CI or locally. Also, it becomes stateful if it pulls data from a database, S3 or anywhere else on AWS which it almost always does. Lambda is a function call. So it makes no difference if it’s proprietary or not. Are you saying that it’s difficult to test passing an object to a function and asserting that it’s functioning as intended?

Lambas are not simple functions because your environment is different in local compared to production. If I run a Node.js function in AWS Lambda, my Node.js version might be different, my dependencies might be different, the OS is different, the filesystem is different, so I or one of my node_modules might be able to write to /tmp but not elsewhere, etc. It's the reason people started using Docker really. If you don'…

It is far too easy to have all the tests pass locally and be completely broken in production for this reason.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#146

Post by coldtea »

goatinaboat wrote: post #141
coldtea wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should accept that most famous CTOs, engineers and other "thought leaders" are not geniuses (also, they're often corrupted by financial interests) That goes without saying! That said, serverless might be 2x slower and 8x more expensive, but all that would be irrelevant if it's e.g. 10x easier, so that e.g. 1 programmer/ops guy can do what it took 10 before. I don't think anybody uses things like AWS or serveless…

1 programmer/ops guy can do what it took 10 before. The myth: devs are expensive and hardware is cheap The reality: webdevs are a commodity and AWS is making record profits

The real reality: not all devs required are webdevs, especially if you want to build an infrastructure that can handle millions of people worldwide. It's not like some React and CSS will get you that.

The amount you'll pay for a single additional developer, even if it's "just" 70K, is already close (if not double) your whole Clould costs when you start...

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#147

Post by philliphaydon »

LunaSea wrote: post #143
philliphaydon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No because Lambdas are proprietary which means you can't run it in a CI or locally. Also, it becomes stateful if it pulls data from a database, S3 or anywhere else on AWS which it almost always does. Lambda is a function call. So it makes no difference if it’s proprietary or not. Are you saying that it’s difficult to test passing an object to a function and asserting that it’s functioning as intended?

Lambas are not simple functions because your environment is different in local compared to production. If I run a Node.js function in AWS Lambda, my Node.js version might be different, my dependencies might be different, the OS is different, the filesystem is different, so I or one of my node_modules might be able to write to /tmp but not elsewhere, etc. It's the reason people started using Docker really. If you don'…

Nothing you mentioned has anything to do with the ability to test a Lambda. You’re trying to use limitations and restrictions as friction to backup your inability to test.

There’s a lot of annoying things about lambda. And a lot of stuff I wish was easier to find in documentation. But that doesn’t change the fact that Lambda is more or less passing an event object to your function and executing it.

Writing a function in node 12 and then running it on node 4 and throwing your hands in the air cos it didn’t work isn’t the fault of Lambda.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#148

Post by avip »

pavlov wrote: post #140

Something about the Lambda/FaaS/serverless hype reminds me of early 2000s enterprise Java, when everyone was trying to replace code with XML configuration. It's obviously at a different point in the stack, but the promise is similar: "Just say what you want and it magically happens" — and indeed that's the case for FaaS when your problem is small enough. But XML-configured frameworks also offered that convenience for…

This is indeed a Pavlovic response :)

The promise of serverless is pretty simple, and pretty useful for the right use case - be it unpredictable load, or just very low load, or very frequent deployments, or pricing segmentation, or you don't have anyone as DevOps, and so on and so forth.

I don't recall anyone saying there's any magic involved. The premise is exactly same as cloud compute - you (possibly, depends on ABC) don't need to provision and babysit a server to perform some action in response to http request (or in case of aws lambda, other triggers as well).

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#149

Post by NicoJuicy »

coldtea wrote: post #69
cryptica wrote: post #17

Finally reality is catching up to the hype. I was saying this 3 years ago. Tech should be about results, it should not be a religion. We should accept that most famous CTOs, engineers and other "thought leaders" are not geniuses (also, they're often corrupted by financial interests) and we should not outsource our decisions to them. To innovate, we need to start thinking independently and make our own rational assess…

> We should accept that most famous CTOs, engineers and other "thought leaders" are not geniuses (also, they're often corrupted by financial interests) That goes without saying! That said, serverless might be 2x slower and 8x more expensive, but all that would be irrelevant if it's e.g. 10x easier, so that e.g. 1 programmer/ops guy can do what it took 10 before. I don't think anybody uses things like AWS or serveless…

> it's e.g. 10x easier, so that e.g. 1 programmer/ops guy can do what it took 10 before

Perhaps it's more related to the programmer than the tech stack...

It's also not solely developping, but debugging too. And serverless does make things a lot harder.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#150

Post by dullgiulio »

nailer wrote: post #89
holografix wrote: post #48

Disclaimer: I work for Salesforce, Heroku’s parent organisation. I have had so many conversations with devops managers and developers who are individual contributors and the Lambda hype reached frothing levels at one point. Contradictory requirements of scale down to zero, scale up infinitely with no cold starts, be cheap and no vendor lock in seemed to all be solved at the same time by Lambda. Testability? Framework…

> Testability? Serverless is specifically a stateless paradigm, making testing easier than persistent paradigms. > Framework adoption? Generally we use our own frameworks - I do wish people knew there was more than serverless.com. AWS throw up https://arc.codes at re:Invent, which is what I'm using and I generally like it. > Stability? Industry Skills? Proven Architectures...? These are all excellent questions. GAE,…

Just to be clear: lambdas are not stateless if you, for example, connect to a DB or use any other external service.

State could be somewhere else, but if you are not also "pure", you don't have any improvement over a normal service.

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