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Serverless: slower and more expensive

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Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#701

Post by akoumis »

drieddust wrote: post #697
akoumis wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was running 10,000 transfer jobs in parallel and the longest of them took 12 minutes, the job would take 12 minutes

Yes but you are still charged for 18 hours of compute time?

That’s true, the cost needs to be factored into the model. But the near infinite bandwidth scalability allows the service to exist to begin with. If every job saturates your up and down bandwidth and takes 10 minutes, and you have 100 coming in a minute, you would need to design a ridiculous architecture that could spin up and down instances and handle queuing on the scale of thousands based on demand. Or you can write a simple lambda function that can be triggered from the AWS sdk and let their infrastructure handle the headache. I’m sure a home grown solution will become more cost effective at a massive scale but lambda fits the bill for a small/medium project

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#702

Post by weberc2 »

foxtr0t wrote: post #695
weberc2 wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tell me again what I don’t understand? As someone who has done both, it's far, far easier to stand up a lambda than it is to manage a cluster of servers.

This still doesn’t make sense. There are portable systems that do the same, and have fully managed options, such as kubernetes. In my mind the thing that makes lambda “easier” is they make a bunch of decisions for you, for better or worse. For real applications probably for the worse. If you have the knowledge to make those decisions for yourself you’re probably better off doing that.

> This still doesn’t make sense. There are portable systems that do the same, and have fully managed options, such as kubernetes.

The whole value proposition behind AWS is that they can do it better than your business due (directly or indirectly) to economies of scale. I think Kubernetes is super cool, but rebuilding AWS on top of Kubernetes is not cost effective for most companies--they're better off using AWS-managed offerings. Of course, you can mix and match via EKS or similar, but there are lots of gotchas there as well (how do I integrate Kubernetes' permissions model with IAM? how do I get Kubernetes logs into CloudWatch? how do I use CloudWatch to monitor Kubernetes events? etc).

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#703

Post by Can_Not »

foxtr0t wrote: post #679
hallman76 wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> you can do the same thing with a cluster of free tier t2.micro machines

Not if you already used your free tier. Lambda is X free per month. Free tier t2.micro is X free for first 12 months.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#704

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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

I have a t2.micro that runs several things:

- Mumble server for my wife's WoW guild (They don't use Discord because some of their peeps are running on really dated hardware that can barely handle WoW, let alone an Electron app running concurrently with WoW)

- Taiga.io task tracker

- Dev server for a web game I'm working on (If I ever decide the game is good enough to publish, obviously I'd run dev and prod servers on separate instances)

- IRC bouncer

- Pi-hole DNS for my phone

Containers? Don't need 'em. And each process requires next to no CPU time, so I always have nearly full CPU credits. RAM is enough unless I'm building the latest version of my IRC bouncer, but hitting the paging file for a few minutes is no big deal.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#705

Post by slifin »

abiro wrote: post #105
missosoup wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more steps than 'just use containers and ignore the serverless meme'.

I don’t think anybody advocates for rewriting all existing projects as serverless. But if you’re starting a startup, going all in on serverless will let you deliver better products faster. If Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages would be written today, the secret weapon would be serverless, not Lisp.

I thought Paul Graham still recommends lisp and present day would use Clojure so the secret weapon would be Datomic cloud for serverless lisp

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#706

Post by simmanian »

1337shadow wrote: post #675
abiro wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the point is, with your Django approach, you'll be stuck doing ops work 9-5 once you start getting customers, whereas with serverless you can spend the time to do more feature dev work.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#707

Post by abnerg »

rogem002 wrote: post #596
frenchman99 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Once you factor in the learning time for AWS per a developer the cost is even higher. At my previous company we had project with an AWS deploy process that only two developers could confidently use. Teaching a new developer & keeping them up to date was a big time sink. For comparison we had a Rails app setup on heroku that on day one junior devs were happily deploying to (plus we had Review apps for each PR!)

This is a good point. Expecting developers to understand how to configure service to service IAM permissions and all the other nuances of AWS infrastructure is a fool's errand. Also one of the reasons we started Stackery.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#708

Post by 1337shadow »

holler wrote: post #691
1337shadow wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that sounds cool, what happened to it? that'd be a fun project to work on today :)

I just had no marketing, no partner for that, but I could rebuild that a similar time frame if only I had a plan to make profit out of it. Made it into a local newspapers but that's was the beginning and the end. It's from the times where I was finding musicians in the streets to pay me 50 bucks per website and hosted them on grsecurity hardened gentoo ... which I don't practice at that cost anymore of course. https://www.charentelibre.fr/2010/02/09/article-5-internet-a...

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#709

Post by 1337shadow »

simmanian wrote: post #706
1337shadow wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the point is, with your Django approach, you'll be stuck doing ops work 9-5 once you start getting customers, whereas with serverless you can spend the time to do more feature dev work.

Not quite sure about that, nowadays I require a couple of 20 bucks/month servers to have one CI/staging and one training/production deployments. I'm at the point where I practice CD as in "deploy each git-push to branchname.ci.example.com and run cypress on it" and still am able to deliver in half a day what the customer would expect to happen in two weeks.

And of course, baremetal provides a much better ROI than VMs/VPS/.

Re: Serverless: slower and more expensive

#710

Post by 6510 »

jmnicolas wrote: post #653
abiro wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

90% of Reddit videos are unwatchable for me : they start OK then the quality is downgraded to something unwatchable and there's nothing I can do about it. I even tried to download them with youtube-dl but it doesn't work.

Makes me wonder in how many other [recursive] ways progress is held back by a lack of it.
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