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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#531

Post by k__ »

Silhouette wrote: post #285
brianwawok wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But how many hours/days/years did it take you to learn how all the parts move before you became capable of setting something like that up within a few hours? Anecdotally, stories of businesses abandoning entire cloud automation projects because they wasted weeks and never had anything to show from it don't seem unusual, so evidently a considerable amount of knowledge and skill is required to get value out of these to…

This.

I used K8s and serverless tech and while serverless wasn't as simple as some evangelists try to sell it, it was at least a magnitude simpler than K8s.

Even managed K8s, which removed most of the admin plane work with nodes, was still significantly more work to get up and running.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#532

Post by discordance »

oblio wrote: post #513
nicbou wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OP definitely isn’t running code that needs an SLA if he’s talking about running on personal devices or DO

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#533

Post by iudqnolq »

iudqnolq wrote: post #454
com2kid wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, I took a look at using a serverless framework for a hobby project, and it was just a real pain to get started at all, let alone develop a whole application in. Look into Firebase functions. Drop some JS in a folder, export them from an index.js file and you have yourself some endpoints. > exports.helloWorld = functions.https.onRequest((request, response) => { response.send("Hello from Firebase!"); }); The amo…

And if you need a dependency that has a sub dependency with a subdependency that uses a native module prepare for poorly defined -fun- hell getting it to work. A surprising amount of standard is libs do.

*standard js libs (as in commonly used)

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#534

Post by 1337shadow »

mark242 wrote: post #235
Demiurge wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is owning an AWS account easier than a cheap dedicates server? You should have a code repo and backups in either case. At least some people mention "but I can scale this lambda x1000" and that's one advantage... But you can do all those tasks on a hetzner server in same amount of type, just python scripts.

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…

> Why, in the 21st century, should I as an application developer ever have to worry about that?

Then don't have backups at all, let's see how that goes.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#535

Post by oblio »

discordance wrote: post #532
oblio wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OP definitely isn’t running code that needs an SLA if he’s talking about running on personal devices or DO

I doubt AWS/GCP/Azure care that much about hobby code. Hobby code, that humongous market for development platforms and development tools :-)

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#536

Post by seg_lol »

Havoc wrote: post #64
seg_lol wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay per request needs to be within 2x magnitude of an always on server. Really one should be paying for latency, scale, cpu time and bandwidth.

>Pay per request needs to be within 2x magnitude of an always on server. Are any of them? Stuff like cloud run is very competitively priced when assuming base case...but by its very nature it can scale up near infinitely. And with it bugs & bills. The ability to cap things by 2 order of magnitudes would make me sleep much better. (1 would be better).

They don't, they are all crazy priced which means the cloud providers don't really know what they are doing, forcing people to deploy their own FaaS layers inside their cloud infra, which is a totally valid solution.

Currently, FaaS platforms should be viewed like a cron. The majority of the benefit is if the fn is called in the low thousands per day.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#537

Post by blablabla123 »

michaelt wrote: post #442
methodin wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, having started and abandoned side projects in both aws lambda and google app engine, half your project becomes: * Well, obviously we use a hosted database * And obviously, AWS provides our logging and all our analytics. * Obviously when people call our lambda functions, they do so either through an AWS-specific API, or one constrained to a very limited set of forms. * Of course, we can't blindly let…

Never tried something marketed as Serverless but Google App Engine. If you wanted any performance, you had to follow the Guidelines really closely. Which could be legit, if it's worth the effort but I think it isn't. I think people under-estimate the effort and that the code will require much more not so nice optimizations than expected. That includes very verbose logging. It's sold as carefree and elegant but it only works when using patterns that nobody enjoys. I really liked the log browser and Dashboard though ;) It's like a stripped down version of New Relic and Elastic Search combined.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#538

Post by fart32 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #491
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.)

Just run PHP and MySQL locally? Native PHP on Windows is horrible to set up, but with WSL/WSL2 you suddenly can get a normal Linux environment without much hassle. sudo apt install nginx php mysql, point the www directory of nginx to something on your computer (/mnt/c/projects/xyz) and you've got a running setup. Or run Linux in general, that's what most people I've seen work on backends seem to do. You can run the s…

What's horrible about it? I just download it, unzip to Program Files, add the folder to my %PATH% and that's about it. I didn't find myself in a situation where I would need an Apache or other webserver, the built-in one is good enough. It also makes using different versions easy, no need to deal with Apache and CGI/FPM. You just use other PHP executable.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#539

Post by znpy »

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 view the serverless, specifically aws lambda, as nice way to hook into the aws system and add some code to handle certain events. Basically, to customize the behavior of "the cloud" where aws falls short (for whatever reason).

But developing with "serverless" as base stack? Nope.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#540

Post by RikNieu »

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…

And it's so. So. Expensive.
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