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Serverless: slower and more expensive

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Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#571

Post by marvindanig »

nocman wrote: post #502
marvindanig wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a strawman, nope. Please put the React salesmen on this list of bogus hype as well. It’s all projection and propaganda—zero substance. Here’s the proof of evil intent behind React, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711598

I suspect I am more wary of Facebook than most. However, unless there is something in that linked discussion that I'm just not seeing, I don't get it. Or perhaps your idea of "proof" and mine are just vastly different.

proof = hint. /correction

i guess we’ll have to wait for the trail of destruction to appear as proof of everything else that has come from Facebook.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#572

Post by mtnGoat »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #544
mtnGoat wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW. It has worked great for us, saving us mid six figures per year or more. The savings keeps increasing as we figure out ways to move more of our workload over to Lambda, we are even running PHP there. Step functions, lambda, sns, sqs and api gateway are pretty cool tools for a lot of projects when used properly. I think the paradigm shift in how you need to make things work is frustrating for some, but once you g…

mid-six figures is $500k?? Are you factoring in salaries to get to that number or merely AWS spend? I'd love to see a spreadsheet with this analysis.

fair question... $500k in measurable lowered AWS spend(cancelled RI's and end of term and never renewed). if i figured in salaries and was fair about it, id say about 80% of that was actual savings, 20% was related to costs involved with rewriting or porting code. i wouldn't count the costs of new features into that as that is still forward progress, just writing in Lambda rather then for life on a traditional web server.

to put this into perspective we have grown about 10x and our monthly AWS bills have actually lowered. so I have no way of knowing what this workload would cost on EC2, going down that rabbit hole would produce a "savings" number easily into the millions.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#573

Post by cthalupa »

mrich wrote: post #550

The AWS bill seems high already. $90 dollars for m1.small, which has 1 vcpu and less than 2GB memory? At my current hosting provider that machine costs less than 5euro! What am I missing? Looking at the hourly usage it seems to be the equivalent of 3 machines running 24/7, so 15 euro, but still?

The older the instance type is, the worse the price/performance is. They'd save money upgrading from the m1.small to a similar sized t2 or t3 instance.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#574

Post by PKop »

zinckiwi wrote: post #569
anderspitman wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firebase does a lot of stuff. Originally it was a small company that focused on providing a real-time JSON-like backend store for web apps. But then they got bought by Google and seem to have evolved into Google's answer to a lot of AWS services, ie hosting, real-time DB, serverless, and probably more I'm not aware of.

I've often looked at and played with Firebase since it does so much of what I need to back a React Native-based app for simple mobile games and utilities. I always end up talking myself out of it due to Google's history of pulling the plug on (what seem to an outsider to be) perfectly good, stable products that wouldn't do any harm to keep around indefinitely. As a hobbyist, I wouldn't have the time or motivation to…

This seems more applicable to consumer products, not business / cloud services, though I imagine I might be overlooking something.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#575

Post by fourthark »

marvindanig wrote: post #189
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.

Not a strawman, nope. Please put the React salesmen on this list of bogus hype as well. It’s all projection and propaganda—zero substance. Here’s the proof of evil intent behind React, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711598

Um, I couldn't find any evil in that thread, sorry.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#576

Post by robot »

Typical of new technologies. You naively start building a startup thinking the new stuff (today that is react and serverless) will be more cutting edge. And then you find out the new stuff adds complexity you don't need especially while starting out with a new product idea. You are misinformed because of the hype and end up paying for it because you are inexperienced.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#577

Post by [deleted] »

abiro wrote: post #50

PSA: porting an existing application one-to-one to serverless almost never goes as expected. Couple of points that stand out from the article: 1. Don’t use .NET, it has terrible startup time. Lambda is all about zero-cost horizontal scaling, but that doesn’t work if your runtime takes 100 ms+ to initialize. The only valid options for performance sensitive functions are JS, Python and Go. 2. Use managed services whene…

[deleted]

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#578

Post by staticassertion »

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…

Keeping all of your feedback to yourself sounds like a great way to maintain a bias.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#579

Post by mattbillenstein »

mtnGoat wrote: post #572
mattbillenstein wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mid-six figures is $500k?? Are you factoring in salaries to get to that number or merely AWS spend? I'd love to see a spreadsheet with this analysis.

fair question... $500k in measurable lowered AWS spend(cancelled RI's and end of term and never renewed). if i figured in salaries and was fair about it, id say about 80% of that was actual savings, 20% was related to costs involved with rewriting or porting code. i wouldn't count the costs of new features into that as that is still forward progress, just writing in Lambda rather then for life on a traditional web se…

Man, that makes no sense to me if it's just aws cost -- very basic back of the envelop calculating assuming you had $500k to spend per year on cpus on aws:

A c5d.2xl (8 cores) on aws is about $1875 per year reserved, $500k per year would buy you over 2100 cores; if you only did 100 req/s per core, you'd be able to handle something like 213k req/s average.

Just the alb costs on lambda at this request rate would cost you $10MM annually... 20x the cost of doing it on VMs.

    >>> 500e3 / (1875.0/8) * 100 * 60*60*24*365 / 1e6 * 1.51
    10158796.8

    $500k to spend
    $1875 per box / 8 cores per box
    100 req/s
    60*60*24*365 seconds in a year
    1e6 requests per $1.51 of alb spend
Staggering the amount of work you can do with just the amount of money you saved and it seems impossible to me that lambda was able to account for this?

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#580

Post by outworlder »

nostrademons wrote: post #522
abiro wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled. As a side note, I've learned that the existence of a large number of v…

> If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled.

That's... not true. The choice of web stack – and, in fact, the whole software – is just a piece of what a startup may need.

Seriously, look at the list of YC startups on 2018 and tell me if most couldn't use either something like Rails, or a Single Page App In React With A Serverless Backend. And it wouldn't matter one bit.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/these-are-the-64-startups-...

> it's likely that the real answer is "develop a blockchain app instead".

I hope that was sarcasm.

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