The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled • Hacker News Board

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#511

Post by diggan » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

sippingjippers wrote: post #486

nicbou wrote: post #478

I don't buy into serverless. I went to a webdev convention, and it ended up being a serverless hype train. Industry experts with a financial incentive to promote serverless went on stage and told me they can't debug their code, or run it on their machine. They showed me comically large system diagrams for very simple use cases, then spent an hour explaining how to do not-quite-ACID transactions. Oh yeah and you can o…

AWS in particular seem to have a carefully refined technical sales/certification/advocacy channel whose main product is those fucking stupid architecture diagrams. Hello world service with $4000/mo. worth of geo-replicated backing databases, CloudWatch alarms, API Gateway instances, WAF etc. But don't let it encourage you to think serverless has no value, or it can't be done portably or cheaply. It has its sweet spot…

Reminds of something that was on the HN frontpage some month ago, where readers are not sure if it's a parody or not, because of the architecture you're required to deploy yourself to use this new "Perspective" product. Direct link to the architecture, that in the end serves the use case of generating a diagram of your AWS resources: https://d1.awsstatic.com/Solutions/Solutions%20Category%20Te...

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-perspec...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552779

(regarding costs, this setup ends up being +$500/month, again, to draw graphs of your architecture https://twitter.com/der_rehan/status/1308242717307174912)

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#512

Post by oblio » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #497

sippingjippers wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me how much experience with serverless architectures the author of the parent comment has, but speaking as someone with plenty, the operational costs of serverless are at least equal to managing stateful infrastructure, with much less control when things go wrong. Lambda was a major step up in long term predictability compared to for example App Engine, where there have been plenty of instances of o…

This. 100 times this. Also, in several places most of the services downtimes are due to, you know what? Application bugs, not infrastructure outages. Sure, they happen as well and being on a good cloud provider mitigate a lot of them (but not all of them!) but if you increase the application design complexity you will increase also those downtimes. Yeah sure, there are tens of really good engineering departments wher…

You're getting rid of a whole lot of lower stack issues, and I say this as a part infra guy myself.

Yes, Ops will still have stuff to do, it will just be at another level.

It's inevitable, that's why we're not making our own memory cores anymore.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#513

Post by oblio » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 10:51 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #487

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…

I don't do any server admin. My code runs in docker on pretty much any server I can get my hands on. Some of my code runs on a ThinkPad stashed behind my desk, on DigitalOcean, on my Macbook. I could deploy to a Raspberry Pi and it would run just the same. It takes 10 minutes to deploy an exact copy to a new environment. None of that requires OS maintenance. My house plants require far more maintenance than my softwa…

What if your ThinkPad is unplugged? What if its HDD dies? Why aren't you updating the OS? Did you patch the firmware for Spectre/Meltdown? Etc, etc

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#514

Post by davidgatti » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 11:00 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #478

I don't buy into serverless. I went to a webdev convention, and it ended up being a serverless hype train. Industry experts with a financial incentive to promote serverless went on stage and told me they can't debug their code, or run it on their machine. They showed me comically large system diagrams for very simple use cases, then spent an hour explaining how to do not-quite-ACID transactions. Oh yeah and you can o…

Well, only because you had bad teachers doesn't mean the topic is bad. You had the misfortune to interact with people that don't understand the topic they try to explain. I try to give a simple explanation here: https://consulting.0x4447.com/articles/knowledge/should-i-go... - just as a starting point to at least get a frame of reference when to use and not to use Serverless. But hey I'm just a random person in a random location on this planet :)

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#515

Post by whalesalad » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 11:06 AM UTC

Toutouxc wrote: post #398

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe it's the moment when there's a solution that just makes sense and works well for most people. A gold standard that other solutions will try to develop more and spice up, instead of reinventing it.

Precisely!

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#516

Post by Spearchucker » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 11:07 AM UTC

I've lived through the genesis of the modern internet, the move from command-line to GUI, dot-matrix, Java's birth, smartphones, .Net's birth, AMPS and GSM, the iPod, NTSC, all the web tech from JavaScript, CSS, MongoDb, Bitcoin, JQuery, Node, to agile, modern JS libraries and of course serverless, and countless others.

The result of it all is cynicism. Serverless takes a lot of work to learn and get good at. The benefit is negligible - no more than deploying a "serverless" thing to an existing web server we use for cross-cuting concerns like exception handling, logging and communication. 10 seconds of automated configuration management, another 10 to deploy. The Change Approval Board meeting to rubber stamp the deployment takes longer.

The breathless hype machine has and always will be just that - hype. Someone's "new, improved, OMG I found this you must use it now" perspective is a pattern that's older than Gartner's hype cycle (which in itself has no basis in fact). It works well in the startup world, but has virtually no place in a business-critical environment, let alone healthcare, defence, telcos or similar.

Little wonder it's adoption has stalled.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#517

Post by malinens » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #487

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…

I don't do any server admin. My code runs in docker on pretty much any server I can get my hands on. Some of my code runs on a ThinkPad stashed behind my desk, on DigitalOcean, on my Macbook. I could deploy to a Raspberry Pi and it would run just the same. It takes 10 minutes to deploy an exact copy to a new environment. None of that requires OS maintenance. My house plants require far more maintenance than my softwa…

actually You can not run Your code smoothly on Rasberry PI because it has different architecture (ARM) and needs different sets of dependency images (If You are lucky at all Your deps are available on ARM)

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#518

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

diggan wrote: post #511

sippingjippers wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS in particular seem to have a carefully refined technical sales/certification/advocacy channel whose main product is those fucking stupid architecture diagrams. Hello world service with $4000/mo. worth of geo-replicated backing databases, CloudWatch alarms, API Gateway instances, WAF etc. But don't let it encourage you to think serverless has no value, or it can't be done portably or cheaply. It has its sweet spot…

Reminds of something that was on the HN frontpage some month ago, where readers are not sure if it's a parody or not, because of the architecture you're required to deploy yourself to use this new "Perspective" product. Direct link to the architecture, that in the end serves the use case of generating a diagram of your AWS resources: https://d1.awsstatic.com/Solutions/Solutions%20Category%20Te... https://aws.amazon.c…

[deleted]

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#519

Post by sajithdilshan » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 11:20 AM UTC

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…

Just throwing this out here https://www.slappforge.com/sigma Last time I checked, it even provides in-built code debugging as well.

DISCLAIMER: I used to be a developer of this product (it's from the previous company I've worked)

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#520

Post by raxxorrax » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 11:21 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #478

I don't buy into serverless. I went to a webdev convention, and it ended up being a serverless hype train. Industry experts with a financial incentive to promote serverless went on stage and told me they can't debug their code, or run it on their machine. They showed me comically large system diagrams for very simple use cases, then spent an hour explaining how to do not-quite-ACID transactions. Oh yeah and you can o…

I bought into hosting stuff on AWS, specifically on EBS which I assume is meant by a 'serverless' infrastructure, but I don't know crap about it.

Still think it is mostly awesome and the services are solid. But such infrastructure comes with its own caveats.

EBS now bugs me about some 'HealthCheckAuthEnabled'. I don't know what it wants, just that I have limited time to react. Cannot understand the clearly auto-translated text. Still didn't get what it wants from me when I read it in English. I banned the health check from my logs and said where it can get a response from the service I run. I hoped our friendship ended there. Maybe it did and this is some form of retaliation.

The load balancer AWS set up for me now suddenly costs money. And I thought I could just use it to grab the free TLS cert that comes with it... well, the clients pay for the additional costs anyway and I would be surprised if anyone even noticed the price spike. The traffic is minimal but I am surprised it is actually that expensive. I could probably cut the costs in half if I actually had motivation to look through all the settings...

Microsoft just cancelled some features of some online service my colleague works with because they want to market an alternative for their BI solution. Did cost him 3 weeks of work at the minimum. The stuff cannot be ported to an on-premise version.

Hosting your own server is a lot of work and isn't fun. There is still a lot of work to do if you host on something on such an infrastructure.

Somehow the amount of work you have to put into software hasn't decreased. Honestly the main argument for it is that you can give away responsibilities.

edit: Just noticed that EBS probably counts as PaaS instead of serverless. I run "stuff" (very simple functions) on Lambda too, but to think it would replace apps like the article suggested seems a bit much. It has its purpose, but nearly everything I have on Lambda is AWS cloud specific. It comes in handy for Alexa integrations for example. I think the container won this fight to be honest.