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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#341

Post by dodobirdlord »

Sebb767 wrote: post #210
jakub_g wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there some sort of security built-in, like "if suddenly the bill becomes 1500% the norm, kill the instance and start serving 404s"? (I know nothing about cloud, honestly curious)

No. Amazon very much prefers uptime over cost cutting; they rather have your website up than read a story about a bill limiter taking you offline. They also tend to be quite lenient on unintended bills. Additionally, bill cutting is not that easy. Should they shut down current services? Stop sending in the middle of a newsletter? Delete your S3 Storage? Even then, a large company might accumulate hundreds or thousand…

Also, Amazon bill’s monthly. They might be able to charge by the second, but they don’t actually have an accurate to the second running count of your total bill.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#342

Post by ethanwillis »

calt wrote: post #322
ethanwillis wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But are you including your own salary into that cost? I believe he is comparing aws bills vs. engineer time+other hosting bills.

Depends on scale of course. There will always be some company that isn't of sufficient size to make it worth the cost.

This is how we actually end up having centralized services. The larger companies who have all this infrastructure, and have the size to justify building their own.. well they inevitably ask themselves "Hey! we have all this infra, we have to pay these people anyways, why aren't we selling excess capacity?"

Then you get AWS. Then as time progresses people at even large institutions that could benefit from running their own infra just go and use another company's infra. Where the other company has evolved into being an infra provider instead of a car parts store, book store(amazon), or search engine.

To answer your question directly. Yes I think this can be done within one engineer salary even if I'm including my own salary. There would be a startup cost that eats into that salary in year 1. But it would be manageable. And then iterative upgrades/replacement parts would be a negligible cost ongoing after year 1. With some financial tricks that startup cost can be spread out over a long enough period that it wouldn't even impact year 1.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#344

Post by klodolph »

franciscop wrote: post #282
konjin wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

99.99% of the websites out there don't need 99.99% uptime (from a business point of view)

Once you get to 99.9% uptime you’re still less than 1 hour per month. I used to run apps for companies at work and it was standard operating procedure to have two app servers + load balancer for upgrades.

Drain a server, upgrade it, boot it, check that it works, let it accept traffic. Repeat once more. Done.

It may be true that most businesses don’t need the uptime, but I’d say it’s usually easier to give them high availability rather than field complaints when some random user tries to look something up during a maintenance window.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#345

Post by erikerikson »

nickjj wrote: post #25

Kind 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…

See the serverless framework [0]. AWS built SAM because they wanted an in house option.

[0] https://www.serverless.com/

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#346

Post by nojvek »

akkartik wrote: post #317
mark242 wrote: post #222

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 com…

I don’t think cloud functions in any of the providers are going anywhere. In fact seeing how google is investing in cloud run (docker images as cloud function) and other providers are catching on, this will be a growing trend.

The ability to take whatever crazy code with spaghetti dependencies and freeze it into an image and have a cloud provider auto-scale from 0 to ludicrous in seconds is phenomenal ability.

I love cloud functions. They make the perfect Webhooks.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#347

Post by nurettin »

t0astbread wrote: post #327
SiVal wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

A middle ground between both would be ideal. Does AWS offer settings to cap your spendings? (I googled and found AWS Budgets but it seems to be only an alerting system, not a cap.)

AFAIK at the moment there is no cap. It's pretty much like going long on a crashing market. However, you can later have a bunch of emails and tweets basically begging to be reimbursed and it works most of the time.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#348

Post by chillfox »

justinram11 wrote: post #231
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.

Mostly it's about the maintenance costs of owning and managing a server -- on Lambda most of these tools are "set and forget". I don't want to have to manage security updates, disk usage, or any of the other multiple things that come with owning a server. I also could probably debate on the friendly-ness of just dumping all of these one-off services onto a single server (seems like it could get messy pretty quick), b…

Servers can also be "set and forget", just enable automatic patching

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#349

Post by ssutch3 »

anamexis wrote: post #286
mark242 wrote: post #222

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 don't know, it sounds like you've just implemented all of those things n+1 times.

And practically every web framework out there provides exactly this type of reusable functionality, not tied to a specific vendor.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#350

Post by ignoramous »

akkartik wrote: post #317
mark242 wrote: post #222

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 com…

Sorry but AWS Lambda (and the related event-based constructs on AWS) is exactly built for the use-cases GP is using them for.

I use it for similar use-cases GP pointed out: It is a breeze to setup but the best part is there's no devops, no sre (pretty much set-it and forget-it) which is pretty great for something that'd be highly-available yet not be expensive at all even for the smallest of businesses.

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