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Serverless: slower and more expensive

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Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#421

Post by hassanjahan »

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…

If you want something performant and cheap you just need to go with Assembly. It's expected that super flexible software platforms are very costly.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#422

Post by ksahin »

cthalupa wrote: post #380
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…

>HN is usually a pretty good gauge for how the wider engineering community feels about a particular technology. HN is a pretty good gauge for how a subset of a very startup focused portion of the engineering community feels about technology. I don't know that the same can be said about it reflecting the opinions of the engineering community on the whole, or if the community is even unified enough for anything to be a…

This! There are lots of people in tech that don’t know/visit HN !

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#423

Post by inimino »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #167
tedk-42 wrote: post #12

I disagree with all the comments posted so far. This should be a perfect use case for lambda, not "oh you're API is receiving more than 10M req/day? Use Elastic Beanstalk instead with an EC2 instance and ELB". This kind of comment is just to abuse the free tier that AWS provide you with. The whole idea of serverless is so you don't have to manage infrastructure. OS patching, mucking around with Docker and and port fo…

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…

Some tools are't the right one for any jobs we actually have.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#424

Post by milesward »

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…

Hugs Chris!

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#425

Post by mrfredward »

anteatersa wrote: post #283
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…

I wonder if it's a generational thing but it seems to me that people nowadays have forgotten that you can host more than one site or database per server. Failing that shared hosting still offers amazing value if you don't need anything to weird e.g. someone like Bluehost or Hostgator offers unlimited* sites + databases for about $5/month

>you can host more than one site or database per server

I'm fully aware of this but never do it because I'm pretty much incompetent as a sysadmin. I don't want to be in a position where I can break an existing project while trying to configure something new I don't understand yet. Nor do I want to run security updates for a blog I setup 5 years ago.

I'm not 100% thrilled with going serverless because it makes debugging awful, but it has saved me money and it makes most things easier. If I went back to shared hosting, I'd just be paying for the privilege of getting to shoot myself in the foot.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#426

Post by munns »

milesward wrote: post #424
tgeek wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hugs Chris!

Hug back at ya big guy!

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#427

Post by edaemon »

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?

They may have used S3 Select: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/s3-glacier-select/

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#428

Post by inimino »

skrebbel wrote: post #129
tedk-42 wrote: post #12

I disagree with all the comments posted so far. This should be a perfect use case for lambda, not "oh you're API is receiving more than 10M req/day? Use Elastic Beanstalk instead with an EC2 instance and ELB". This kind of comment is just to abuse the free tier that AWS provide you with. The whole idea of serverless is so you don't have to manage infrastructure. OS patching, mucking around with Docker and and port fo…

> I'm in the container camp Can anyone explain to me why there's "camps" to this debate?

Because most people with strong opinions aren't experienced enough to justify them from direct experience. Instead we have religions, tribal affiliations, camps.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#429

Post by missosoup »

munns wrote: post #396
missosoup wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And so for data processing/streaming/batch [...] serverless actually does work out pretty well. This is my field of expertise. Serverless in the sense of lambda/functions is not usable for serious analytics pipelines due to the max allowed image size being smaller than the smallest NLP models or even lightweight analytics python distributions. You can't use lambda on the ETL side and you can't use lambda on the que…

The issue of the application artifact size is definitely real and it blocks some NLP/ML workloads for sure. Consider that a today problem that isn't hard in Lambda. But we've 100% got customers doing near realtime streaming analytics in complicated pipelines feeding off of things like Kinesis Data Streams. This FINRA example is one datapoint: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/finra-data-val... and this Th…

I'm not going to make any elaborations on my comment now. Please feel free to edit yours or post another to answer anything I raised. Your original reply containing some generic sales brochures isn't what I expected from someone representing aws stepping into this discussion.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#430

Post by inimino »

tedk-42 wrote: post #153
skrebbel wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm in the container camp Can anyone explain to me why there's "camps" to this debate?

I'd say modern API deployments are either containerised or go the serverless route. On one hand you have a docker image with your source code/static binary baked in. The other you have your source code/binary encapsulated in a serverless framework (with an Event handler of sorts as your input). The container doesn't lock you into a particular ecosystem, but hasn't solved how you deploy and run your container (Heroku,…

What do you mean by "modern"? Expensive and poorly understood?
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