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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#11

Post by synthc »

k__ wrote: post #2

"Limited Programming Languages" AWS Lambda can run all programming languages via layers. Cloudflare Workers can run all programming languages that compile to WebAssembly. "Vendor Lock" True, but being locked into Kubetnetes isn't a cakewalk either. "Performance" Cold-starts aren't a thing for Cloudflare Workers and can be mitigated for AWS Lambda. AppSync and API Gateway don't even have them if you directly integrate…

Sure, everything can be done serverless with a bunch of workarounds, that's one of the reasons it stalled IMO.

Serverless makes somethings easier and other things harder, so it's advantages over good old fashioned servers are clear cut.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#12

Post by mobilefriendly »

aeturnum wrote: post #7

I never quite understood what problem serverless platforms were solving for companies that already deployed their own SAAS solution. As the article says, serverless is one of many (many) ways to wrap a quantum of functionality inside an internet-accessible environment. You could have a chunk of python in a serverless setup, a small flask server in a container in k8s, as an endpoint in a monolith, etc. Each of these e…

Part of the problem is that the hobbyist market is overwhelmingly PHP, which Lambda doesn't support natively.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#14

Post by sdan »

To implement serverless, you'll need to re-architecture your entire infra. For that itself, I don't think it's worth it; because serverless is pretty much all event driven (which many things might be, but might not be able to fit on serverless; even it does, it might just be easier to plop it on a simple instance).

I do see a big potential for small and simple projects though. No need to setup instances and worry about networking: just deploy it and go.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#15

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

jasoneckert wrote: post #6

From an evolutionary point of view, I find serverless appealing and exciting - a romantic idea. However, the frequent posts along the lines of "my Lambda function was buggy and now I owe Amazon three billion dollars" definitely kills the romanticism.

Honestly, we've had a lot of fun with OpenFaaS and services that can publish to it.

You'd be surprised how great it is to pass a parametized query and have it turned into a function quickly.

Doing stupid things on AWS is really easy and sadly billing can be up to 24 hours delayed.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#16

Post by colinbartlett »

mobilefriendly wrote: post #12
aeturnum wrote: post #7

I never quite understood what problem serverless platforms were solving for companies that already deployed their own SAAS solution. As the article says, serverless is one of many (many) ways to wrap a quantum of functionality inside an internet-accessible environment. You could have a chunk of python in a serverless setup, a small flask server in a container in k8s, as an endpoint in a monolith, etc. Each of these e…

Part of the problem is that the hobbyist market is overwhelmingly PHP, which Lambda doesn't support natively.

I’d be curious to see the data behind that claim that the hobbyist market is overwhelmingly PHP. I must not have any exposure to that ecosystem because PHP does not come to mind when I think of hobbyist development.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#17

Post by rupertdev »

mobilefriendly wrote: post #12
aeturnum wrote: post #7

I never quite understood what problem serverless platforms were solving for companies that already deployed their own SAAS solution. As the article says, serverless is one of many (many) ways to wrap a quantum of functionality inside an internet-accessible environment. You could have a chunk of python in a serverless setup, a small flask server in a container in k8s, as an endpoint in a monolith, etc. Each of these e…

Part of the problem is that the hobbyist market is overwhelmingly PHP, which Lambda doesn't support natively.

is it, though? Every person I know with side projects writes them in either nodejs/ + react/vue or django/flask + react/vue/templates

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#18

Post by Havoc »

I think it's more a case of it coming full circle.

People realising that it's just another tool in the toolbox rather than 1 tool that can replace their entire toolbox.

Much of the cynicism seems to come from that.

I do agree with jason though - open ended serverless things charged per use are no fun. Now you can bankrupt yourself at scale with that bug & the 1000 instances.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#19

Post by dcolkitt »

A lot of this just seems to be that Kubernetes works really well. Serverless seemed more compelling to me 5+ years ago.

But nowadays, I just setup my K8 templates with auto-scaling groups on GKE, and it pretty much works just as well as serverless was promised. Compute demand gets seamlessly transformed into compute supply.

I almost never have to think about managing individual hosts. And the cost is cheaper and performance is more predictable than serverless. Plus it's mostly all platform agnostic.

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