Because serverless is not serverless. Fundamentally this doesn't work because if you've gotta have a server in the end, why not either admin yourself or use one of the cloud vendor's other products for more control?
The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
21–30 of 670 posts
Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
#22The issue is that they represent in some manner an 'alternative architecture' that's less mature and hard to piecemeal break out of.
You need to move a few pieces around.
I don't agree that 'once you've gone K8 why bother, just use that' - I don't think K8 is as elegant as the promise of serverless, and it has it's own 'lock in'. Just so happens you may need to have K8s anyhow ... so the pragmatic question then is 'We already have K8s because we have to have it ... so in that context, we can just use it'
If we had a 'severless' version of Docker, i.e. some de-facto standard for it, I think it would obliterate a lot of architectures, just because the promise is powerful.
Developers don't actually want K8s or even true DevOps complexity, we just want a giant computer we can run stuff on and not have to worry.
Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
#23I 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.
People place such high expectations for new innovations solving all of their problems. No, it isn't a panacea: apply it only when it makes sense to do so.
Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
#24I 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.
In my workplace our main product is written in PHP.
Still we have a bunch of Lambda functions written in node we use all the time
Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
#25Kind of surprised the article didn't mention lack of reasonable development environment.
At least on AWS, the "SAM" experience has been probably the worst development experience I've ever had in ~20 years of web development.
It's so slow (iteration speed) and you need to jump through a billion hoops of complexity all over the place. Even dealing with something as simple as loading environment variables for both local and "real" function invokes required way too much effort.
Note: I'm not working with this tech by choice. It's for a bit of client work. I think their use case for Serverless makes sense (calling something very infrequently that glues together a few AWS resources).
Is the experience better on other platforms?
Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
#26Serverless is the new microservice. Fortunately, for the most part it’s fallen flat on its face and for good reason - most companies don’t need it: it adds unnecessary complexity for minimal gains.
It adds complexity in the name of simplicity.
Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
#27Has it? We've been simply throwing huge Django projects into Zappa and seeing huge benefits.
The biggest issue we run into is the more servers you have, the harder it is on the database.
Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
#28Serverless is the new microservice. Fortunately, for the most part it’s fallen flat on its face and for good reason - most companies don’t need it: it adds unnecessary complexity for minimal gains.
Wasn't the point of serverless to reduce complexity?
Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
#29I take issue with all of the complaints here...
- performance: first rule of architecture is that you don't build the entire thing on the needs of high performance...you only address performance as-needed
- vendor lock in: this is the worst reason. Most companies choose cloud vendors and stick with them over many years. I'd love any survey that showed some massive migration between vendors on a regular basis, but it does not exist.
- the monolith: granted, serverless is really best when building something from scratch. Trying to "migrate" to serverless is just a bad idea. Trying to "upgrade" portions is okay, but do it well using the autonomous bubble pattern, making sure you have a solid translation layer
I believe serverless is our best modern architecture, but I also understand that not every company is ready to do the work and/or pay the price of the change in development processes. I'd agree that it's stalled, but moreso out of fear and ignorance than anything else.
Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
#30I see serverless working really well for a few niche tasks. Finite, stateless interactions that don't happen often. A good example will be a site say example.org that has a donate page. On form submit, a lambda can take the payload and create a subscription at a payment service like Stripe or Razorpay. The donate page at https://internetfreedom.in works the exact same way.
The broader idea is a service (or static site even) sending messages to a different service. Given how popular no-code platforms are getting, tiny serverless pieces can help automate operations between these platforms.