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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#401

Post by habosa »

john-tells-all wrote: post #87
spcebar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found firebase functions pretty easy and painless. Worth a look.

Keep in mind Firebase has a big caveat. Firebase is great... for what it does. However, there's no way to easily migrate the Firebase resources to the larger GCP ecosystem. Firebase does what it does, and if you need anything else, you're out of luck. Firebase is magic... but I never recommend it for anyone, until there's some sort of migration path.

[Firebaser here] that’s not quite accurate. For cloud functions they’re literally the same. Your Firebase function is actually a GCP function that you can manage behind the scenes.

With Cloud Firestore (our serverless DB) that’s the case as well. And Firebase Auth can be seamlessly upgraded to Google Cloud Identity Platform with a click.

However you’re right that for many Firebase products (Real-time Database, Hosting) there’s no relation to Cloud Resources.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#403

Post by habosa »

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…

It definitely doesn’t have to be that way. I work on Firebase and I’ve spent most of the last year specifically working on our local development experience for our serverless backend products: https://firebase.google.com/docs/emulator-suite

Still very actively working on this but our goal is that nobody ever has to test via deploy again.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#404

Post by nicky0 »

wiremine wrote: post #199
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…

> 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 and "real" function invokes required way too much effort. Honestly, it reminds me of PHP development years ago: running it locally sucked, so you need to upload it to the server and test your work. It. Sucked.

Out of genuine interest... is there a modern solution to this problem with PHP/MySQL?

(I'm still doing the "upload to server to test" thing.... I've tried MAMP and Vagrant/VirtualBox for local dev but both of them seem horribly complex compared to what we can do with local dev with node.js/mongo and so on.)

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#405

Post by ethanwillis »

mark242 wrote: post #393
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.

If you are not in the CDN business, why on earth would you want to do this? This is my point-- I am not in the hosting business. I am in the application creation business. Every minute that I even have to think about modifying /etc/localtime in order to make sure that the instance is running in UTC is a minute I'm not being productive. Multiply that by those million little things that you have to do in order to keep…

This is a slightly different conversation than the original but I'll give it a shot.

I'm not a woodworker, machinist, farmer, or doing a PhD in literature. Nevertheless, I engage in all of these things. I enjoy crafting things and learning new techniques. I enjoy learning how to optimize plant growth. I enjoy reading old literature and gathering what I can from it about the historical context, linguistics, etc. All of these types of things, while not "productive" give me additional knowledge that I can pull from in "unrelated" tasks.

In the tech world, I'd say that realistically all abstractions are leaky. So engaging in these tasks(you mentioned) are productive. But even more than that because abstractions are leaky this is knowledge that is useful. If you don't have the knowledge of the systems underlying the abstractions you're using it's a footgun waiting to happen.

I can give an example. I had a boss that was doing some serverless work and he made an assumption about JSON. I told him in review that JSON does not respect ordering of keys. Well, he assumed it would not be a problem. It was pushed to production anyways. And a few weeks later it came back to bite him.

Now what happens when you don't dig into your abstractions? You lack the knowledge to fix problems that happen at a lower level. When you're deploying these "relationships" to your database provider. What happens when the machinery breaks down for replication, backups, etc? You have to sit around and wait for an expert to fix your app. Meanwhile you're staring at your users and stonewalling.

No, you're not in the hosting business, you're not in the database tuning business, you're not in the sysadmin business, and you're not in the Ecmascript working group. Until you are. Then when you're foisted into this role you're a fish out of water. Specialization is for ants, but we're humans, not ants.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#406

Post by randomsearch »

This advantage:

“Serverless models don’t require users to maintain their own operating systems, or even to build applications that are compatible with particular OSs. Instead, developers can produce generic code, and then upload it to the serverless framework, and watch it run.”

... is utterly compelling and is why serverless will not just win, but leave renting a server a tiny niche market that few developers will have an experience of post 2030.

Maintaining your own server is completely nuts. If that isn’t obvious now, it will be in another decade. It’s massively inefficient. Like running your own power plant to serve your factory, except you also have to worry about security and constant maintenance, along with all the moving parts that surround a server.

Almost all the objections in the article can be rephrased as “serverless is not mature enough yet”, and that’s accurate, but I suspect there’s also a bias against giving up control to the cloud companies, and some wishful thinking as a result.

The future of software development is going to be defined by cloud providers. They’re going to define the language ecosystem, the canonical architectures for apps etc... it’s just early days and cloud is really very primitive. Just clicking around Azure or GC or AWS illustrates how piecemeal everything is. But they have a lot to do, and just keeping pace with growth is probably hard enough. I’m not sure I’m super happy with this outcome, but I’m pretty certain the trend line is unmissable.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#407

Post by cheeze »

wokwokwok wrote: post #397
nafey wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that survival is guaranteed if you do it the right way. Long term thinking can work in firms that are larger. For smaller firms with limited resources, motivation and technical expertise getting velocity is crucial. This is one of the reasons startups run into issues when they have to scale. I think it has to be a well thought out balance of speed and quality that is required in such environments.

That's such a straw man, it pains me to even respond to it. Doing it 'quick and dirty right now with the tools I happen to know' instead of 'doing some research, then doing it in a way that is maintainable using standard tools and taking a bit longer' isn't 'endangering the survival of the company', it's professional level practice. Failing to do so is, a) negligent, and b) incompetent. I'm certainly not suggesting t…

You are on such a high horse, it pains me to even respond to you.

You can call it devops, a mess, whatever you want... but nothing about serverless frameworks is creating that mess. A service is a service, whether it's running Lambda, Spring Boot, or whatever the hottest new framework is... Nothing prevents you from documenting a service. Nothing prevents you from creating basic alarms (it's literally easier for me to create these alarms because of CDK than it is to alarm on the standard service framework I use).

We get it, you don't like serverless. But you're going to rag on OP and question their competence, and then drop some "you pick the label you want to wear"? Come on dude, seriously?

You're strawmanning too here... Can you show me where OP said they are using one tool for all of their tasks? they literally said "for one-off, little processes."

I cant imagine what it's like to be this arrogant.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#408

Post by dpacmittal »

nicky0 wrote: post #404
wiremine wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 and "real" function invokes required way too much effort. Honestly, it reminds me of PHP development years ago: running it locally sucked, so you need to upload it to the server and test your work. It. Sucked.

Out of genuine interest... is there a modern solution to this problem with PHP/MySQL? (I'm still doing the "upload to server to test" thing.... I've tried MAMP and Vagrant/VirtualBox for local dev but both of them seem horribly complex compared to what we can do with local dev with node.js/mongo and so on.)

Php has an inbuilt server you can run with `php -s`

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#409

Post by skvark »

GFischer wrote: post #232
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…

I can report that Azure Function App development is at least pretty decent, as long as you have the paid Visual Studio IDE and Azure Function Tools (haven't tried the free version yet). I tried AWS Lambdas a few years back and it felt way more primitive.

Azure Function App development experience is indeed pretty nice at least when using .NET Core. There are some issues, like loading secrets to the local dev environment from Key Vault has to be done manually and easy auth (App Service Authentication) does not work locally.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#410

Post by randomsearch »

habosa wrote: post #403
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…

It definitely doesn’t have to be that way. I work on Firebase and I’ve spent most of the last year specifically working on our local development experience for our serverless backend products: https://firebase.google.com/docs/emulator-suite Still very actively working on this but our goal is that nobody ever has to test via deploy again.

Love firebase, thanks for your work! the local emulator suite is so important a feature and keenly following your progress.

Slightly OT... perhaps cheeky... any idea why firebase doesn’t provide automated backups for firestore and storage out of the box? Seems like a no brainer and a valuable service people would pay for.

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