Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't wait until society swaps the meaning of left and right through memes
The Ministry of Serverless (Miniless) is working on it.
We should just move to "hyposerver" already
A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
101–110 of 266 posts
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. Someone else maintains the software running these services, including OS upgrades, security upgrades and patches, uptime monitoring, etc. This is the standard marketing phrase echoed to promote serverless. By experience, I don't think is valid. Packages like unattended-upgrades automates all this stuff. Also, not being able to verify what the software is doing is scary and looks like a 10 steps backwards to me.…
The long and short of it is that “serverless” is all done on a pay-per-use basis. So is running a VM to host an email server — let’s say $5/month on the low end. With this setup you’d be paying pennies a month assuming normal personal usage. If you were running an email server for your Fortune 500 company, yeah this wouldn’t make sense. But for personal usage? Assuming SES isn’t on the shit list of Google et al this…
This use case and logic seems really weird to sell the serverless buzzword. My personal email has been somebody else's problem since the 90s and is done through the provider of my personal domain at no additional cost.
Setting up a serverless email server seems like something I'd have to bother with and maintain a few years down the line when the platform of choice inevitably changes something. Some use cases of serverless applications just shift maintenance efforts. Sure, I don't have to update OS packages. I still have to wonder if the service I'm using for my serverless stuff will be there (for startup vendors) in a few years or, more likely for vendors like AWS, change their terms, pricing or aspects of their API. I can pay a student intern to maintain a single VPS based $whatever, AWS consultants cost a multiple of that. If that's something you can and want to do yourself, sure, that's great - even for small use cases like this but then it becomes a philosophical toy problem more than a technical challenge.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#103I don't know anything about serverless --- to this day I fail to understand what this word is even supposed to mean. And the deployment diagram[1] sure looks complicated to me. I think I prefer old-school servers. [1]: " rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0x4447/0x4447-product-s3-e...
The benefits to using this approach over a traditional server are: 1. Someone else maintains the software running these services, including OS upgrades, security upgrades and patches, uptime monitoring, etc. 2. Since every logical component is an independent service, each scaling independently, any one single component is unlikely to become a bottle-neck while scaling. In traditional monolithic servers, you'll have t…
> Assuming this works as advertised, you can go from zero to a full blown email service for organizations with thousands of people (assuming the stated AWS limits are lifted), in record time
As someone who has been in this industry for over 30 years from being a grunt to wearing CTO hats if there's one thing that my experience unquestionably taught me is that there's absolutely nothing ever works like it is advertised. Ever.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a single post on Hacker News can use the term "serverless" without the exact same replies being posted every time. It's as if a certain portion of the HN crowd simply cannot fathom that a new term exists and is in use, and instead resort to the same, tired responses.
I think some folks are afraid of losing their jobs, so they lash out with snark.
Someone else said on HN, developers don’t just move to the cloud to avoid administering servers, we also want to avoid server administrators.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. It's in this case, using the term serverless is akin to calling cloud based software (Google Docs, TurboTax, etc) softwareless. It's closer to calling a stop sign a "go sign" than descriptors from your example. Calling managed servers "serverless" is distinctively misleading.
How is it any more misleading than “bugs”, “containers”, “the cloud”,”server farms”, etc. Wouldn’t you be the first to criticize someone who didn’t take the time to understand other computer concepts that had been around for years and then attempted to speak intelligently about them?
The term serverless is not a metaphor like your examples, it's a contradiction. Big difference. I feel like understanding the "computer concepts" makes the term seem even more absurd.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it’s not just managed hosting. Managed hosting still means there is a server to maintain, patch, and that it is always running.
So it's essentially GoDaddy's side business where you uploaded some code using ftp and they took care of everything else?
Could Godaddy’s side business launch isolated VMs when items appeared in a queue? A file appeared on a server? Events came from a stream? Could it respond to any events besides http?
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it any more misleading than “bugs”, “containers”, “the cloud”,”server farms”, etc. Wouldn’t you be the first to criticize someone who didn’t take the time to understand other computer concepts that had been around for years and then attempted to speak intelligently about them?
The term serverless is not a metaphor like your examples, it's a contradiction. Big difference. I feel like understanding the "computer concepts" makes the term seem even more absurd.
It’s an abstraction - just like every other computer concept.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serverless: Somebody else's server
No, and this is why we have a bunch of old school Net ops guys who pass one certification, call themselves “cloud consultants”, do a bunch of lift and shifts and leave clients paying more than just using a colo.
Serverless is an architectural and design strategy. Run away from anyone that claims EC2 is serverless.
You can't lift and shift to serverless... Period. The design choices are almost always breaking changes.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#109I don't know anything about serverless --- to this day I fail to understand what this word is even supposed to mean. And the deployment diagram[1] sure looks complicated to me. I think I prefer old-school servers. [1]: " rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0x4447/0x4447-product-s3-e...
Serverless: Somebody else's server
I would argue a better description is --
Serverless: abstracted services that don't require you to know or care about the underlying server.
It's still not perfect, sometimes you do need/want to know/care, but it's usually superficial -- e.g. what libraries are installed by default so I can optimize the build.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#110> This stack was created out of frustration due to the fact that to this day there's no easy way to have a full email server without the overhead of installing and configuring all servers needed to handle incoming and outgoing messages. Interesting approach, though I solved this frustration by the use of a Docker and kept "my data is mine" + "no vendor lock-in" + "I control all the gears" approach. (Though, it's not…
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