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Serverless: slower and more expensive

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Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#671

Post by drieddust »

akoumis wrote: post #637
ses1984 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've had jobs that took 18 hours to run on single machine finish in 12 minutes on Lambda. I could run that process 4 times a month and still stay within AWS's free tier limits. Ok I'll bite. What takes 18 hours to run on a single machine but finishes in 12 minutes on Lambda.

I worked on a service a year ago that would stream a video from a source and upload it to a video hosting service. A few concurrent transfers would saturate the NIC. Putting each transfer job in a separate lambda allowed running any number of them in parallel, much faster than queuing up jobs on standalone instances

Yes but running multiple lambda jobs in parallel would still add upto more time than 12 minutes. What am I missing?

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#672

Post by devit »

"Serverless" is just an aggressive form of container-based autoscaling, and thus has no fundamental difference from it, although of course pricing can unfortunately be arbitrary and thus cause artificial distinctions.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#673

Post by bsenftner »

neuronic wrote: post #144

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 tha…

It's a mindless horde, an entire industry of half experienced idiots and half burned out savant engineers conning and rescuing one another in a cluster fuck of confusion. For the old school greys, the cloud itself is a con, as running a server oneself is actually quite easy, and exponentially better in every respect than slices of someone else's oversold hardware.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#674

Post by guzik »

frenchman99 wrote: post #289
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…

I can't support point 7. enough. People often forget about the cost of labor. We migrated our company webapp to Heroku last year. We pay about 8 times what a dedicated server would cost, even though a dedicated server would do the job just fine. And often times, people tell me "Heroku is so expensive, why don't you do it yourself? Why pay twice the price of AWS for a VM?" But the Heroku servers are auto-patched, I ge…

Same for us.

- Corrupted build? Reverse button for the rescue.

- SSL? They got you.

- Adding new apps in less than 1m?

and so on ...

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#675

Post by 1337shadow »

abiro wrote: post #639
foxtr0t wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to summarize, you should: 1. not use the programming language that works best for your problem, but the programming language that works best with your orchestration system 2. lock yourself into managed services wherever possible 3. choose your api design style based on your orchestration system instead of your application. 4. Use a specific frontend rpc library because why not. ... I've hacked a few lambdas toget…

Think about serverless as framework-as-a-service. It has a learning curve, but if you buy in, it is an amazing productivity boost. (If Reddit’s video hosting being built and operated on a serverless stack by a single a engineer won’t convince you, I don’t know what will.)

In 2010 I was 24 yr old and built a myspace clone SaaS with music and video hosting with everything it implies: large uploads, background jobs, compiling an nginx patch to support range requests, ajax to have videos and music playing while browser, with Django on a 20 bucks/month server. If you're not convinced I don't know what will.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#676

Post by jijji »

For decades I'm paying $80/month for each 2U dell poweredge R815 with 1TB of RAM and 48 cores, hosted in a datacenter with redundant power. I'm sure it is fun to play around with all these expensive services Amazon offers, but when you see the billing side of what they do, its not really worth it.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#677

Post by hallman76 »

ses1984 wrote: post #617
hallman76 wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've hacked a few lambdas together but never dug deep Then why comment? You clearly don't understand the use-case that AWS fits. I've had jobs that took 18 hours to run on single machine finish in 12 minutes on Lambda. I could run that process 4 times a month and still stay within AWS's free tier limits. For the right workloads it is 100% worth realigning your code to fit the stack.

>I've had jobs that took 18 hours to run on single machine finish in 12 minutes on Lambda. I could run that process 4 times a month and still stay within AWS's free tier limits. Ok I'll bite. What takes 18 hours to run on a single machine but finishes in 12 minutes on Lambda.

We developed a web-based tool that described water quality based on your location. We generated screenshots of every outcome so the results could be shared to FB/titter. It was something on the order of 40k screenshots. Our process used headless chrome to generate a screenshot then it was uploaded to S3 for hosting.

Doing that in a series took forever. It took something like 14 hours to generate the screenshots, then 4 hours to upload them all. Spreading that load across lambda functions allowed us to basically run the job in parallel. Each individual lambda process took longer to generate a screenshot than on our initial desktop process, but the overall process was dramatically faster.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#678

Post by karlmdavis »

jbverschoor wrote: post #646
Bombthecat wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not wrong. But it is all about saving money on labor. The rest are just the constraints of the system you use. (Aka requirements) its like complaining about the need to use posix for Linux.

20 years ago. We had enterprise java, it’s still “there”, but running spring is very different from what it used to be. You’d simply upload an ear or ear and the server and deployed would handle configuration like db etc. It worked perfectly (ear/war, the persistence framework was too verbose and high level imo, but that was replaced by hibernate/jpa). There was too much configuration in xml, but that could easily be…

> Again.. we are running in circles, and this industry will never learn, because most “senior” people haven’t been around long enough.

And that likely won't change in our lifetime, given the rate of growth in demand for software: we literally can't create senior engineers fast enough for there to be enough to go around.

As an aside, I have the privilege of working with a couple of senior folks right now in my current gig, and it's pretty fucking fantastic.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#679

Post by foxtr0t »

hallman76 wrote: post #677
ses1984 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've had jobs that took 18 hours to run on single machine finish in 12 minutes on Lambda. I could run that process 4 times a month and still stay within AWS's free tier limits. Ok I'll bite. What takes 18 hours to run on a single machine but finishes in 12 minutes on Lambda.

We developed a web-based tool that described water quality based on your location. We generated screenshots of every outcome so the results could be shared to FB/titter. It was something on the order of 40k screenshots. Our process used headless chrome to generate a screenshot then it was uploaded to S3 for hosting. Doing that in a series took forever. It took something like 14 hours to generate the screenshots, then…

The parallelism argument doesn’t pass muster because you can do the same thing with a cluster of free tier t2.micro machines with any good orchestration platform, not just lambda.

This argument is basically: no counterpoint to the original post, but you can do things that are also easy on any other comparable platform.

Tell me again what I don’t understand?

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#680

Post by committed »

chmod775 wrote: post #41

A $10 VPS would've been enough to handle the kind of load his site sees too, which is about 15x cheaper again than AWS. If you're really looking to save money, don't touch AWS. Source: I run the frontend for an interactive "one-page-app" site about 3x larger on a $30 VPS with room to spare.

Which VPS provider do you use and what is your backend stack?
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