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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#311
post #277
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I optimize for escape hatches. Because if everything is on fire I want the ability to be able to bail(fix it).

There's no point in waking up when everything is blowing up if you don't have the access to fix the underlying issue. AWS doesn't actually guarantee 99.9% uptime. What they guarantee is they'll give you some company currency[1] if they can't meet or exceed 99.9% uptime.

So the next time the ship is on fire, don't worry, stay asleep and your Amazon account manager will be by shortly with a thimble of water to throw on you :)

[1] - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/aws-syste...

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#312

As someone on a two-man-team who runs a lot of little "utility" functions in AWS Lambda with the Serverless Framework[1] to support our DevOps / Build processes, it's been one of the most productive tools in my toolkit (after the initial learning curve, of course). It allows me to stand up a practically maintenance-free endpoint in a matter of hours (usually to glue separate services together): * Want to run a quick…

I'm ignorant

How does a build trigger the serverless function to notify all of you? I kind of assume serverless means it activates on a timer or when you visit a specific URL. So a build script executes it by visiting a URL when it's finished? And the script executes from any internet connected machine?

Why is it better than having a VPS? I currently use a VPS for a few one off scripts. Cron does the timer ones and the URL ones are entries in a nginx config file. Actually that's half true I actually config an app I wrote to do it cause I didn't want to bother finding out how to do shellexecute on nginx

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on why you dislike Django? Would be great to hear from someone with extensive Python experience.

On the flip side, not being able to use Django is one of the reasons against serverless for me. There's immense value in having a library for anything you might think of, installable and integratable in minutes. You have to roll your own way too often in Flask et al, so much so that I don't see any reason to use Flask for anything other than ad-hoc servers with only a few endpoints.

Check out Django-Zappa. It’s Django that runs in a Lambda.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#314
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.

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

A very good point. Exchange the risk of a problem taking you offline, losing sales, for the risk of a problem not taking you offline, costing you a fortune.

That's a big selling point for DigitalOcean: you sleep easy knowing what your bill will be. If you have an unexpected spike in traffic--whether a great opportunity, a mistaken test run wild, or a DDoS--it doesn't increase your bill. AWS offers the opposite: no matter what happens, we'll keep you online and just send you the bill.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#315

As someone on a two-man-team who runs a lot of little "utility" functions in AWS Lambda with the Serverless Framework[1] to support our DevOps / Build processes, it's been one of the most productive tools in my toolkit (after the initial learning curve, of course). It allows me to stand up a practically maintenance-free endpoint in a matter of hours (usually to glue separate services together): * Want to run a quick…

A 2 man-team with a project manager.

Man1: I'll work on your report.

Man2: I'll watch you work on my report.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have run AWS vs colo at scale. For the cost of precisely 1 engineer fully loaded, I can have 500TB of bandwidth per month, every month. Guess what, it isn't going to take just 1 engineer to maintain your homegrown worldwide CDN. Does it make sense for FAANG to run their own datacenters? Yes of course. Does it make sense for you? No. This is what I don't get about arguments for running a bunch of VPSs-- for literall…

Maybe it's hubris, but I'm 99% sure I could run a homegrown worldwide CDN for the cost of one engineer salary. I'd be willing to take that bet from anyone who thinks it can't be done.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#317

Here's why I love serverless. I cannot tell you the number of times I have implemented "upload your photo and it'll get resized to (profile avatar size from design specs)". It's ridiculous, and it's one of those things that everyone burns time implementing their fun hook into Imagemagick. Now I have one lambda that gets pointed at a new record stream from an S3 bucket, and I'm done. I cannot tell you the number of ti…

I favorited your comment, but I'll be curious to see how rosy your outlook is in say 10 years time. My prediction: all the use cases you're using it for are not the ones that it's designed for (i.e. which pay AWS's bills). And historically, unintended/illegible customers have a way of being caught out as the vendor shifts between strategies.

Certainly, I hope you can be the remora to this shark for a long time to come. Just be aware of the benefits and drawbacks of the position you're taking.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#319
post #303

Here's why I love serverless. I cannot tell you the number of times I have implemented "upload your photo and it'll get resized to (profile avatar size from design specs)". It's ridiculous, and it's one of those things that everyone burns time implementing their fun hook into Imagemagick. Now I have one lambda that gets pointed at a new record stream from an S3 bucket, and I'm done. I cannot tell you the number of ti…

> It's that it makes that level of code reuse that much simpler. You have all of these helper infrastructure functions that you implement for every single project you work on, and reusing that glue code is so, so much easier in Lambda/GCF/AF/etc. That sounds great until you need to add a feature or fix a bug in the reused code. Then you deploy a change to a Lambda function that impacts X other projects immediately, w…

Lambda has pretty good support for versioning and aliasing so you can control that sort of roll out.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#320
I don't agree to the authors points. Serverless is another tool in your belt, do you still need to make decisions with tradeoffs? Yes. Do the big 3 support most languages you need? Yes. Is vendor lock in real? Maybe but how many companies actually move cloud providers often, or ever? Most companies I know are still trying to get into the cloud. You can't run full applications in serverless? That's not the use case, again with decisions you need to make.
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