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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#271

Post by akkartik »

konjin wrote: post #245
Demiurge wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is owning an AWS account easier than a cheap dedicates server? You should have a code repo and backups in either case. At least some people mention "but I can scale this lambda x1000" and that's one advantage... But you can do all those tasks on a hetzner server in same amount of type, just python scripts.

Because you need two servers. One to run the application. One to run the application while the first is being upgraded. Now you need three servers, one to run the application, one as backup and one as load balancer. 99.99% uptime means you can be down no more than an hour a year. Which is really easy to overshoot when you're dicking around with a dist upgrade on three linux boxes. So that's why you end up with a serv…

Notice that grandparent comment explicitly carved out production servers. If you can't tolerate downtime while you're being upgraded, you're production.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#272

Post by rjbwork »

luhn wrote: post #49
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.

We have build our apps and create a lambda zip file and deploy it out of band of our Terraform. We just upload the zip file to S3 after deploy and if Terraform runs and makes a change to the Lambda, it deploys the most recently deployed version automatically.

We did this so we could totally separate our applications and the infrastructure as code stuff since infrastructure changes at a drastically slower rate than applications.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#273

Post by brianwawok »

k__ wrote: post #86
shiftpgdn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

K8s can go almost anywhere any time with fairly minimal ramp. With the frequency I am hearing about AWS billing disputes these days it's probably best to not seal the keys to your kingdom in their service.

The problem is getting K8s to the point that it can go almost anywhere.

Eh? I was able to go from a docker image to live and 0 downtime deploys in a few hours?

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#274

Post by recursive »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #259
recursive wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand serverless, but if it's running a process in response to a request, then of course there's still a server, because something received that request. FCGI has a server running. And serverless has a server running, as long as its listening for requests.

The running server is a server you don't pay for.

So the truth is revealed. The real technology of serverless is an innovation in billing models.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#275

Post by mushbino »

ethbr0 wrote: post #209
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is shaping up to be Oracle 2.0. That isn't a compliment.

Given an opportunity to milk existing, locked-in customers in lieu of investing in R&D and new products, few leadership teams can resist. Time will tell.

I'm predicting AWS will wait for a competitor to do the R&D work, see if it's successful, and then look for a way to beat them at their own game.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#276

Post by Silhouette »

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.

I was baffled, bemused even, by the article's premise that anyone rational ever thought serverless was going to take over the software world. It's a tool for solving a certain niche problem, not a general replacement for the vast majority of software we run. It's quite a good example of both the potential benefits and the potential difficulties of working in the cloud.

Whenever I read these articles, I always wonder what proportion of tech buzzwords from the past decade are just obscure ways of saying "someone else's servers", "automation" and "unnecessarily complicated architecture".

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#277

Post by spyspy »

crehn wrote: post #263
mark242 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this exactly. The fact that I can guarantee that my code is running, and have entire massive teams at Amazon whose literal job title is to keep my code running, it is such a freeing feeling. I might be able to delete rows from Dynamo from my code messing up, but Dynamo will never go offline.

The psychological effects of technology seem often overlooked—and they’re hard to quantify. I wish there was some easier way to quantify the “soft” aspects of everything that surrounds us, e.g. the long-term impact of beautiful and usable UI design, the reduction in “ambient” psychological stress, the impacts of chaos/consistency on how we feel, any robust measures of happiness, excitement, relaxation, etc. They seem…

My joke around the office is some people optimize for latency, some for throughput, some for memory usage. I, however, optimize for sleep.

My entire goal is for my services to never wake me up. And if they do it had better because I clearly messed up and am the sole human alive able to fix it.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#278

Post by kranner »

crehn wrote: post #241
mark242 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that "cheap dedicated server" isn't all that cheap. Just the documentation for backups on your Hetzner server is ridiculous. Why, in the 21st century, should I as an application developer ever have to worry about that? Let's say that Hetzner server goes completely toast at 2am and you get a pingdom message. You log in, realize you have to restore from backup. You fire up a new instance, and go through your re…

And I’d argue the mere possibility of the server breaking at any time contributes to non-negligible amounts of sustained psychological stress.

What about the psychological stress of a massive AWS bill because of a misconfiguration by you or someone on your team?

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#279

Post by mmaunder »

mark242 wrote: post #247
crehn wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I’d argue the mere possibility of the server breaking at any time contributes to non-negligible amounts of sustained psychological stress.

Yes, this exactly. The fact that I can guarantee that my code is running, and have entire massive teams at Amazon whose literal job title is to keep my code running, it is such a freeing feeling. I might be able to delete rows from Dynamo from my code messing up, but Dynamo will never go offline.

This is so naive. Unless you’re just creating utilities all day long, at some point you’ll actually have a production service that people are using that needs to be monitored, even if it is build out of lambda functions. And unless you’ve run AWS vs colo at scale, you have no concept of the orders of magnitude cost savings on bandwidth (at 95th percentile billing vs per gig) and compute.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#280

Post by joana035 »

cle wrote: post #171
tupputuppu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need serverless for that. Any PaaS such as heroku provides those benefits.

I'm not really interested in having the 1,000th discussion about the definition of "serverless". The parent was wondering what the value of the paradigm is, so I provided a list of specific features that many companies consider valuable with serverless offerings.

I hope this "risk aversion" mindset starts to apply to code as well.

Can't wait for codeless, zero code, nocode, whatever name it gets called... something where normal people can build their own ideas without having meaningless discussion about tdd, frameworks and etc, nor the need to maintain codebases, ci/cd and all the jazz

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