The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled • Hacker News Board

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#431

Post by na85 » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:35 AM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #406

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 h…

>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...

That's... quite depressing to consider, actually. I long for a return to the internet of yore when Native apps were still king and not everything was as-a-service.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#432

Post by Nextgrid » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:36 AM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #273

k__ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is getting K8s to the point that it can go almost anywhere.

Eh? I was able to go from a docker image to live and 0 downtime deploys in a few hours?

My worry is less about getting it set up to run a container and more about securing it, monitoring it and being able to respond should things go wrong.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#433

Post by demosito666 » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:37 AM UTC

nullsense wrote: post #191

jsemrau wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got the hand of cloud formation. I suppose it is nice from a visual (drag and drop) point of view, but I couldn't use it in production and moved on to manage my architecture with terraform.

CDK is a massive improvement over raw CloudFormation, and people are starting to move away from Terraform and to things like CDK or Pulumi.

This is a really funny thing, since for the last ~10 years I've been hearing how we're deliberately doing IaC/CM tools "not a programming languages because reasons" (and thus have to do horrible hacks to support trivial things like loops and conditions), and now suddenly we're building libraries in programming languages that convert the code into non-programming-language description, which is then interpreted by a program into several other intermediate representations and finally emits trivial API commands. I guess the next step would be write a declarative language on top of CDK or Pulumi that will compile it into python which will generate CF/TF files.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#434

Post by methodin » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

pantelisk wrote: post #414

nicky0 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

"docker-compose up" and your OS, codebase, dependecies and data is up and running locally in the exposed local port of your preference. You can even split parts in different layers to mimic a services/cross-region logic. Of course this won't fix the fact that you have a lambda behind api gateway that does some heic->jpg conversion and can't be hit outside the DMZ, or some esoteric SQS queue that you can't mimmic loca…

FWIW I haven't hit any scenario out of the basic services that localstack couldn't run locally. I even have it executing Terraform on localstack as if it was AWS (without IAM which is indeed a problem when I forget to create/update policies)!

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#435

Post by OriPekelman » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

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.)

try https://lando.dev/ uses docker under the hood... but simplifies it all to the extreme.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#436

Post by ehnto » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:39 AM UTC

Juliate wrote: post #423

randomsearch wrote: post #406

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 h…

It's massively inefficient, but it's also still massively safe in comparison, regarding soveignerity. Like, today, given the political uncertainty in the USA, any large company would be nuts to bet on hosting their critical services on US-dependant infrastructure without having a huge plan B already in the works.

Is there a serverless provider with a "self hosted node" option that could be used as a fallback? That pretty much defeats the purpose of serverless, but at least you could hang on while figuring out how to transition to a new solution if the provider fails.

That has always been my sticking point. With AWS in particular. I don't trust AWS to exist forever, and it's definitely not without it own ongoing maintenance issues. Locking my entire business into their ecosystem seems risky at best.

Something I see really often in startups is huge dependencies in the form of SaaS. It should be no secret to those in tech that many of these businesses will not be around in 3 years. Even the likelihood of their service staying the same for 3 years is pretty low. I have been bitten by enough deprecated services, APIs and Incredible Journeys that I am wary.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#437

Post by raxxorrax » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:47 AM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #406

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 h…

In my experience, maybe it just isn't there yet, serverless has much more points of failure than a conventional infrastructure. I am sure there a lot of software that really needs the scale the cloud can provide. Funny thing is that we tend to use it for tiny apps, some IOT voice interfaces or BTB tools that we don't want in our corporate network.

I doubt cloud providers can dictate environments, other providers would quickly fill the gap to meet developer preferences. I also think that more developers care about lock in these days.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#438

Post by madsbuch » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

What serverless does is to force the developer to have a sharp separation of code and persistence. For all cases. Even saving a small inter-request variable that lives for 5 seconds or less.

What serverless does is to force scalable architectures.

The price is slim to no control over build and execution environment as a consequence of not taking the underlying architecture into account. For many people this is not an issue. These people will be very content with serverless and should definitely use these types of solutions.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#439

Post by zshrdlu » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:51 AM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #406

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 h…

On the other hand, perhaps endeavors akin to NixOS and Guix will make maintaining your own operating system trivial.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#440

Post by Lucasoato » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:51 AM UTC

methodin wrote: post #430

noncoml wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developers can produce generic code There is nothing generic about the code that runs on serverless services. It’s the ultimate lock in.

I disagree. Every AWS Lambda function I've ever written can be ran as a regular node/python process. The lambda-specific part is miniscule. If I wanted to run these on Azure or Google only the most inconsequential parts of the function would need to be changed.

Using a stack like serverless framework the amount of lock-in is negligible.