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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#351

Post by JoshMcguigan »

notanotherycomb wrote: post #312
justinram11 wrote: post #220

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 t…

It’s like your VPS except without having the manage OS and NGINX updates. And probably higher availability if you are concerned about that.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#352

Post by chrisco255 »

eghri wrote: post #248
k__ wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAM is okay-ish. Felt still better than K8s to me. Have you tried Amplify?

I found Amplify excellent to get up and running quickly. I’d highly recommend it for anyone without a well-oiled CICD setup who wants to quickly get a website up to test out an idea. Unfortunately, I quickly hit the limits of its configurability (particularly with Cloudfront) and had to move off it within a few months.

You could just use Amplify for the backend and pair it with any other front end host / CDN provider. I've used it with Vercel and it works great.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#353

Post by nostrebored »

tomc1985 wrote: post #332
crehn wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m assuming this is a joke, but this is exactly what most people who just want to run some code don’t want to deal with.

Then maybe they should learn how to deal with it

Learning how to deal with it is great, until you find out what you don't know.

Dealing with server infrastructure isn't business differentiating. Doing it poorly can certainly be business terminating, though.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#354

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

whalesalad wrote: post #299
dahfizz wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a systems developer, comments like yours make me amazed at the state of web development. From the outside looking in, it seems like 10% code and 90% monkeying around with tooling and frameworks and stacks.

It’s still a very young ecosystem. Serverless hasn’t had its Rails moment (yet). I don’t think it’s as bad as people make it out to be.

What's the Rails moment? It's already hit the part where people speak about it as if it will save the world.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#355

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

justinram11 wrote: post #220

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…

Is anyone else worried about the proliferation of disjoint processes that people can whip up using Serverless? At least with a monolith, you've got a relatively coherent grouped together codebase. But with Serverless, you can have some lambda that is infinitely important, but not documented or well known to anyone else in the org.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#356

Post by sudhirj »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #355
justinram11 wrote: post #220

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…

Is anyone else worried about the proliferation of disjoint processes that people can whip up using Serverless? At least with a monolith, you've got a relatively coherent grouped together codebase. But with Serverless, you can have some lambda that is infinitely important, but not documented or well known to anyone else in the org.

Serverless and microservices aren’t the same thing. You can deploy a monolith to lambda, and make a thousand small services on VMs or orchestration platforms. It’s purely a question of how to organise your code.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#357

Post by leephillips »

erikerikson wrote: post #335
notanotherycomb wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The serverless framework is an open source tool that you can use to "deploy" "serverless" assets. Basically it covers most of those scripts you usually have to write and gives you a declarative format with some great variable capabilities that help you managed config and declare your components clearly. Running the tool deploys to your cloud of choice and results in functions, APIs, workflows, databases, or whatever…

Thanks for this concise and pithy description. I keep hearing about serverless...services, but didn’t understand what they were all about.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#358

Post by maxcbc »

A fifth reason it has stalled, cost.

For constantly running applications it can be cheaper just to run a server. This fact has been used to avoid migrating to serverless by a lot of orgs i’ve worked with, even when it doesn’t apply to their use case.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#359

Post by ec109685 »

rogerkirkness wrote: post #289
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…

It would be nice if someone made a machine that would run all three of those discrete, generalized computing tasks on a single general purpose "thing". That way, you could infinitely scale your work up or down within available memory based on what needed to be done. It would even intelligently free something from memory if it wasn't being used. Servers.

You can with lambda too. You map each of these to the same lambda function and branch off path, just like a server.
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