Serverless: slower and more expensive • Hacker News Board

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#361

Post by 0xDEFC0DE » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:03 PM UTC

johnfactorial wrote: post #286

rdsubhas wrote: post #114

This is how a conversation with a colleague who were enthusiastic about Serverless, and who's company was mostly on Java/JVM stack went: Colleague: Lambda is awesome, we can scale down to zero and lower costs! We love it! We use cool tech!! Me: What did you do about JVM warm up? Colleague: We solved it by having a keepalive daemon which pings the service to keep it always warmed up. ... Me thinking: Uhh, but what abo…

> Lambda seems to be a fast prototyping tool. My thoughts EXACTLY. The great power in "serverless" architecture (i.e. AWS Lambda + AWS RDS + AWS Gateway) is how it empowers prototyping a new product. Counterintuitively, it's future-proofing. You should know in advance that it's too slow & expensive. But you get to spin up a prototype backend very rapidly, pay only for what you're using while prototyping, and Lambda's…

I don't understand the prototyping angle.

Can't you just do something on your local machine?

There's stuff like dotnet new for .NET where I can just run that and have a skeleton project for a backend and I can start writing code immediately. I assume there's template creators for other languages as well.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#362

Post by Tenoke » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #173

ordinaryperson wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Like anything, right tool for the right job. I was hosting my personal website on EC2 with an RDS instance and it cost around $20/month. But since the site gets little-to-no traffic and I got sick of EC2 upkeep, I switched S3 & Cloudfront: now my bill is $0.80/month. Another example: at work we inherited an old EC2 instance that was set up solely to run cron jobs on other servers. Occasionally it would lock…

How did you replace a site that needed rds with s3? Was it a blog that you moved to Jekyll or something?

S3 is just slower but in theory you can do everything you can with rds.

So e.g. if the queries you are making aren't time sensitive or are easily cached switching to s3 can be okay.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#363

Post by munns » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

tgeek wrote: post #347

missosoup wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the 80% or more, serverless works just fine. Cite this. I don't believe you. I'm across a pretty broad slice of industry and can only draw on anecdotes from colleagues, but the majority of people with actual hands-on experience are disillusioned and say that the biggest (only?) drive for serverless at this point is top-down organisational pressure created by technically incompetent strategic management that loo…

Hi there, Hey there, I lead Developer Advocacy at AWS for Serverless ( https://twitter.com/chrismunns ). I'll give you that this 80% number seems pretty out there. I don't know how that is measured or what it would be referencing. If you step back and remove all the commercial software from the argument (something like 50%+ of enterprise workloads, the kind of things you buy from a 3rd party and just run it, like Sha…

and I totally posted this from the wrong account... sigh..

this is me. Thanks, - Chris Munns - AWS - Serverless - https://twitter.com/chrismunns

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#364

Post by munns » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

tgeek wrote: post #293

Hey there, I lead Developer Advocacy at AWS for Serverless ( https://twitter.com/chrismunns ) and have been involved in this space since pretty much the start. Thought I'd toss my hat in the ring there as there seem to be some fairly passionate responses across the board here. This post is accurate. It's accurate in the new dev experience of someone picking up a framework tool and following the standard walkthroughs/…

and I totally posted this from the wrong account... sigh.. this is me. Thanks, - Chris Munns - AWS - Serverless - https://twitter.com/chrismunns

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#365

Post by kstrauser » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

missosoup wrote: post #300

tus88 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all strawman. There are valid reasons for serverless, most people choose it for reasons other than hype, and the savings and security of not self managing servers is tangible. All technology can be misused or poorly utilized, and even the best can have pathological edge cases. For the 80% or more, serverless works just fine.

> For the 80% or more, serverless works just fine. Cite this. I don't believe you. I'm across a pretty broad slice of industry and can only draw on anecdotes from colleagues, but the majority of people with actual hands-on experience are disillusioned and say that the biggest (only?) drive for serverless at this point is top-down organisational pressure created by technically incompetent strategic management that loo…

An example of where serverless is lovely for us:

We run on AWS. We log lots of stuff to CloudWatch. CloudWatch allows you to scan for regexps (more or less) and send matching lines to a destination of your choosing. There are about 5-10 such matching events per day that we care about, and when they happen, we want an alert in a Slack channel (or email or text or PagerDuty or...).

Option A:

Stand up a server. Deploy a web service on it that accepts POSTs from CloudWatch and acts on them. Update the box as OS vulnerabilities come along. Pay 24/7 for a server that accepts 10 incoming requests per day.

Option B:

Write a plain Python function that takes the contents of a POST that's already been processed and has no other idea that it's living behind a web server. Drop it in Lambda. Pay for 1000ms of processing time per day.

I wouldn't want to run our entire stack on Lambda and friends, but for certain specific situations it's brilliant and I wouldn't want to give it up.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#366

Post by herostratus101 » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

nickjj wrote: post #162

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…

Agreed. ~2 years ago I seriously looked into Serverless and very quickly discarded it after seeing a large production deployment of it. I didn't have access to the billing info but the site loaded much slower than a regular site and developer productivity was quite low. I'm going to stick with good old servers for now. If anyone is curious, a few years ago I did a write up on "Should your next project be built as a S…

Hey nickjj, you may want to update your blog post to reflect that the Lambda timeout is now 15m, not 5m.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#367

Post by maccam912 » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

missosoup wrote: post #300

tus88 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all strawman. There are valid reasons for serverless, most people choose it for reasons other than hype, and the savings and security of not self managing servers is tangible. All technology can be misused or poorly utilized, and even the best can have pathological edge cases. For the 80% or more, serverless works just fine.

> For the 80% or more, serverless works just fine. Cite this. I don't believe you. I'm across a pretty broad slice of industry and can only draw on anecdotes from colleagues, but the majority of people with actual hands-on experience are disillusioned and say that the biggest (only?) drive for serverless at this point is top-down organisational pressure created by technically incompetent strategic management that loo…

I like serverless for my own use cases, but I don't usually comment about it. People would probably not be interested. I have an HTTP call happen once every five minutes or so and just record the response. Thats it. About 100 ms of time. I would be paying more if I just had an always-on server doing this type of work. The sentiment we normally hear on HN is from people who really love or really hate something. I appreciate the option, but other than that I'm not going to be telling the world about my simple use case.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#368

Post by api » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

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…

Serverless was just a lock in model pushed by big cloud vendors.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#369

Post by mywittyname » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:11 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #191

While there is a lot of lambda/serverless hate in this thread, I (who have no experience with it) am reluctant to conclude based on this alone that lambda is useless/stupid. Need more info. Is there anyone who has had success using lambda, or can anyone find a write-up of a success story? That would help me (and others) understand/believe better I think; if it's a very rare case where lambda ends up being helpful (wh…

The best use of Lambda is to programmatically respond to an event that was triggered by an AWS service, and typically have the response go to another AWS service. Lambda is a poor choice for tasks outside of this domain.

We used it with great success in our data pipeline. Payload data comes into an S3 bucket, Lambdas will transform that data into a standard format and pipe the result to another S3 bucket. The data then needs to be filtered, post processed, then sent to many different data sources owned by different teams (inside or outside of AWS). Each of these steps are also a Lambda.

The benefits are that up to a thousand concurrent Lambdas can be running, so performance doesn't really degrade with service loads. We can handle requests from dozens of teams all over the world with a team of two developers. We almost never have an unexpected outage. And, most importantly to me, we can add new features very quickly.

For example, when a team builds a model in Python against the data, other teams want access to said model, our team can port it and integrate it into the pipeline in a day or two.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#370

Post by innocentoldguy » Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

We implemented Serverless and OpenFaaS at work for part of a large financial application. We're now in the process of ripping it all out. I'm sure Serverless and OpenFaaS have their places on low-traffic, low-compute sites, but both fall down hard when things get at all serious.