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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#41

Post by seg_lol »

Havoc wrote: post #18

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.

Pay per request needs to be within 2x magnitude of an always on server. Really one should be paying for latency, scale, cpu time and bandwidth.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#42

Post by viraptor »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #36
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…

Another niche where it shines is the small, low-volume tool. You don't want to give it an entire VM, because that's a major waste. You don't want to have it share one "tools box," because it is awkward sharing like that, security becomes more of an issue, and it generally devolves into a mess. So if you've got other things running on AWS, then AWS Lambda is great for this. Do you need a random web-facing snippet to r…

I use that a lot. There's the joke lambda spackle sticker (https://www.thecloudpod.net/product/lambda-spackle-sticker/) but that's exactly the great use case.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#43

Post by lovehashbrowns »

I am still on the serverless high, and I don't see it going away any time soon. For the large corporation that I work for, things like soc2, patching, server maintenance, etc. are a giant pain every single month. The quicker we switch as many things as possible to serverless the better. One of the services I converted over went a year and a half with absolutely no attention from our engineers. It was great seeing how old the latest deploy was. Coupling serverless with terraform and git makes everything even easier. It means doing things like adding another lambda to an API as simple as copy and paste terraform, replace phrases in terraform, write code. terraform apply and done.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#44

Post by staticassertion »

pauldickwin wrote: post #10
GiorgioG wrote: post #5

Serverless 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.

Except that people actually used microservices and microservices are actually additive and helpful.

People on HN seems to believe that outside of Google it is impossible to have problems that are complex and high scale, therefor if you use microservices and/or serverless and/or nosql etc etc it's just that you're following the hype, not that you legitimately benefit from them.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#45

Post by pixl97 »

lrem wrote: post #28
GiorgioG wrote: post #5

Serverless 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?

It turns out that complexity is very hard to reduce.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#46

Post by paxys »

It's a valid opinion piece, but I don't see any numbers or facts in it that point to the stall of serverless. From what I can see in the industry services like Lambda are still very highly used and growing exponentially.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#47

Post by superfrank »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #36
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…

Another niche where it shines is the small, low-volume tool. You don't want to give it an entire VM, because that's a major waste. You don't want to have it share one "tools box," because it is awkward sharing like that, security becomes more of an issue, and it generally devolves into a mess. So if you've got other things running on AWS, then AWS Lambda is great for this. Do you need a random web-facing snippet to r…

I'd add on top of that, that it provides even more value when volume is usually low and sparse, but unpredictable.

If you have a server that can handle up to 100 requests at a time, but you're only getting one or two a day, you could probably save money by switching to serverless. On the flip side though, you're also a bit screwed if 1000 requests all come in at once, since, even if you have some autoscaling solution, it probably won't be able to bring new servers up in time. Serverless provides a solution for that case as well, since you have almost unlimited resources.

But yeah, serverless is a tool for solving a certain set of problems. This idea of the "Serverless Revolution" was kind of silly from the start

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#48

Post by ThinkBeat »

Issues we had in our adopting it:

I like the term "nano services" is it probably the wrong term. But I like it.

We went monolith -> micro services -> micro services + nano services

Everything that adds complexity in a micro service system, adds far more complexity with nano services.

Debugging and tracing is a nightmare. And yes, logging, a lot of logging and instrumentation helps. But if you add too much of it then the whole point of the nano services is lost.

Versioning can get complex, depending on your deploy model. Presumably if you push 100% of your nano services with every deploy you can get around it.

We have about 600 nanoservices running on AWS now across 4 different systems.

My advice, that nobody would ever ask for, keep AWS Lambda for certain special tasks where they are a very good fit.

As always run the numbers, performance, cost to run, cost to maintain. Will the immense ability to scale really help your use case?

In most of our cases, no, they will not.

For some companies it will be a great solution and solve pain-points, save money

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#49

Post by luhn »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #43

I am still on the serverless high, and I don't see it going away any time soon. For the large corporation that I work for, things like soc2, patching, server maintenance, etc. are a giant pain every single month. The quicker we switch as many things as possible to serverless the better. One of the services I converted over went a year and a half with absolutely no attention from our engineers. It was great seeing how…

How do you use Terraform with Lambda? That's been one of the huge painpoints in my limited Lambda experience. All the CI tools (SAM, Serverless Framework, e.g.) seems to want to handle the IaaS part themselves and step on Terraform's toes. I just want to set everything up with Terraform and then have a nice simple tool to build and deploy the application.
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