Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hug back at ya big guy!
Really? Hahahha
Miles and I know each other, what's wrong with a friendly hug?
Do you need a hug hesburg?
Serverless: slower and more expensive
511–520 of 733 posts
Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive
#512Unofficial Lambda vs EC2 calculator https://servers.lol/
Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive
#513I 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…
If they had used an ALB instead of API Gateway, the cost might well have been a 2x increase, especially given that would replace the ELB they're already using. The ALB option has it's own caveats though...
One frustrating caveat of the ALB approach is there is a hard 1 MB limit on both the request and response size, while APIGW has a hard 6 MB limit.
Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive
#514Earlier 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…
> 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 Silicon Valley feels about a particular technology.
Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive
#515I was recently at a AWS company conference, run by AWS. Serverless was being pushed so hard, yet no one could explain exactly why it was superior. Note: we are a fortune 500 company that receives constant traffic.
Are there use cases? Absolutely. Does anyone really understand those use cases? Not really, from what I've seen.
Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive
#516"Serverless", or "App Engine" as it was called for the few years prior the hype, actually delivers pretty good results for a range of parameters. It might even be a wider range of parameters than the ones where the results are subpar... Or not, I'm not sure how to weight the "I have a predictable base load large enough for its cost to dominate the other factors" vs the other cases. But as always - popularity of a too…
App Engine is a PaaS, not serverless/FaaS
I don't think there's a real difference
https://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/original-serverles...
Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive
#517Earlier 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…
Datapoint: I'm using serverless because it lets me deploy a new API endpoint in a matter of minutes. There is 0 configuration, and deployment is a single command. I also have my own servers running some of my APIs, the difference how much work I have to do is huge. Serverless on Google Firebase is literally "export a function, now you have a new endpoint!". There is, quite literally, nothing else to do. I can move 5x…
Is your API so large and/or unstable that optimizing for time needed to add an endpoint is your lowest hanging fruit?
Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive
#518Earlier 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…
I spend six figures a month in AWS, on a mix of servers and serverless. Serverless is more cost effective for sporadic, bursty things where the cost of an instance sitting idle outweighs the more expensive per-operation costs of serverless. On sustained load, it is almost never cheaper. Another price to pay is complexity; it's simply more difficult to build, deploy, and monitor serverless systems.
> Another price to pay is complexity; it's simply more difficult to build, deploy, and monitor serverless systems.
What do you mean by serverless systems?
My experience isn't with AWS, but with Azure, so maybe it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
My experience has been that building, deploying and monitoring even moderately complex, interdependent Azure Functions has been less difficult than building the equivalent services to deploy to IaaS or on-prem. FWIW, a big part of that reduced complexity has been offloading infrastructure management to Azure instead our IT guys, but deployment and monitoring has also been practically painless. Are there some complexity "gotchas" that I've missed?
Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive
#519Earlier 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.
I really doubt not managing servers is an advantage other than initial launch for MVP or some simple webhook. The overhead of managing API gateway, monitoring and log in a more large scale serverless application is larger than managing several linux servers.
I'm not sure about your quantification of the overhead, I think you can have wins with severless there, but the other side of it is that you can make your server management a source of strength.
This is becoming unfashionable because it is arcane, but *nix (and Windows I'm sure) really provide some rich functionality and tunability that can let you move fast or reach performance/scale challenges that are very expensive or perhaps out of reach otherwise.
Of course, at one point I was told the same thing about managing your own hardware, and the thought of dealing with the jumpers on the back of the harddrive fills me with the same sense of frustration I'm sure a newer developer would feel when learning their disk is out of inodes for the first time.
Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive
#520Earlier 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…
Here's an anecdote: I'm a one man shop who has been planning, developing and deploying Django applications for six years. I have not got to the point where my deploys are automated because I am swamped with work just keeping my clients up to date and my servers ticking along. I usually deploy one client per $5 DO VPS.
I just deployed my first project to PythonAnywhere and I am blown away at how much easier is. I'm going to pass the cost on to clients and that's that. I'm going to be less stressed and can concentrate on what I want to do: build applications.
I don't know if it's "severless" in the same sense as AWS Lambda or whatever, but I can imagine many solo/small shops seeing less ops work as a godsend.