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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#371

Post by dtech »

sudhirj wrote: post #356
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd say that is misleading at best. Lambdas are inherently unsuited for monoliths due to payload, RAM and execution time limits and cold start times. Lambdas are inherently suited to "real" micro-services, because by nature can only do 1 thing and have strict limits.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#372

Post by klodolph »

vanviegen wrote: post #368
klodolph wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

But where does the data sit? Would you be using some fancy multi-master synchronous replication for that, or is there a database server behind it?

A pair of database servers (leader and hot spare) behind it, although some data was in-app and shared between the two app instances (or more; two was the minimum).

I don’t think of this as particularly fancy or expensive, considering how much you have to pay for engineers and technicians. It was critical enough for >3 nines, and that means having a technician on-call.

I saw this setup at two different companies I worked at, even though the tech stacks were completely different. Whenever I price out setups for similar requirements in cloud I almost always end up with basically the same setup, just on cloud VMs instead of dedicated servers.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#373

Post by [deleted] »

AWebOfBrown wrote: post #123
Aeolun wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can do the same thing with fargate, and that’s tons easier to manage.

Fargate is considered a serverless service. Serverless generally encompasses FaaS + BaaS. Think anything whose infrastructure you can use without touching the underlying VM(s): SQS, SNS, EventBridge, RDS, Lambda, Fargate, Athena, Kinesis and so on.

[deleted]

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#374

Post by jedberg »

tomc1985 wrote: post #329
mark242 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You seem to forget there is are a ton of people who grew up on bare metal and know it quite well. And they can squeeze far more performance out of it then you could ever hope to see with outsourcing business-critical infra to a supplier who literally doesn't give a shit about you. Have fun with an army of one-trick pony hires. One old-school diehard computer nerd knows enough to supplant 10 of those fools, but only c…

And many of them already work for AWS, who I can pay a small premium to to take advantage without having to hire one myself and then worry about replacing them when they decide to leave.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#375

Post by jedberg »

ethanwillis wrote: post #316
mark242 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're forgetting that a huge part of that is maintaining accounts at a bunch of different colos and maintaining relationships with account managers and shipping hardware and all of the non-engineering work involved in running a CDN.

You'd be spending more than 1/2 your time just on the phone talking to people.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#376

Post by wokwokwok »

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…

Sounds like its working for you, which is great, I guess.

However in general what you're doing isn't devops, its 'devs creating a big old mess for someone else to cleanup later'.

All you're doing is trading long term maintainability and quality for 'getting it done right now'.

Sure; it works. I get it. ...but I've also been on the receiving end when that 2-person team has 1 person leave and gets scaled up to a 5-person team, and you have to a) bin everything, and b) write the entire thing from scratch.

I personally consider it a very selfish way to build things. Me first. Me now. ...someone else's problem later.

There are scalable solutions in this space (eg. pipelines, airflow, azure data factory, glue); doing it using lambdas is... not. ideal.

That's not a problem with severless in general; but what you've described isn't any of the things which is good about serverless either: what you've described is the problem with the low barrier to entry with serverless, resulting in production serverless code that skips past 'quality control' to 'let's deploy straight to production!'.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#377

Post by m12k »

Overall isn't serverless just a cost optimization for intermittent compute workloads? That's handy, sure, but I also figure that costly workloads like that are rare enough that it's obvious why the "revolution" would stop well before conquering the whole cloud market.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#378

Post by 0x008 »

I find that this is such a bold claim, when the original study cited only states that 63% of respondents did not plan to deploy any microserve-based architectures in the upcoming years. However, 37% do. That is a LOT. And there is not a single data point relating to the years prior, so a claim that the "revolution has stalled" is actually impossible to make, because we do not know if there ever was one.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#379

Post by ethanwillis »

jedberg wrote: post #375
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.

You're forgetting that a huge part of that is maintaining accounts at a bunch of different colos and maintaining relationships with account managers and shipping hardware and all of the non-engineering work involved in running a CDN. You'd be spending more than 1/2 your time just on the phone talking to people.

I definitely have not forgotten this aspect of it. Let's just say I've spent a lot of time on the phone for fun

If we want to talk about running a CDN company in terms of lots of additional organizational complexity in terms of customer service it can't be done on a single engineer's salary. My perception of a homegrown CDN is one that rivals uptime and deliverability metrics of existing commercial CDN providers. Within an existing org it can be done. If we're talking outside of an existing org think http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/ to shave costs.

If we're willing to define parameters on what level of service this CDN needs to meet and ramp up time I'd be willing to take it on.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#380

Post by brylie »

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.

My psychological stress is knowing our company is hemorrhaging 50k €/month on AWS fees (mainly Lambda, step functions, and CloudWatch) to run a production app that could easily run on a couple of VMs (for failover) and a managed DB instance.

Edit: add RDS to the parenthetical list of AWS services above.

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