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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#611

Post by methodin »

dragonwriter wrote: post #443
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.

> Every AWS Lambda function I've ever written can be ran as a regular node/python process. The lambda-specific part is miniscule. Of the actual function code, sure. Of course, if you aren't manually configuring everything and are doing IaC, that isn't generic. And if you are supporting the Lambda with any other AWS serverless services, the code interfacing with them is pretty AWS specific.

I was only talking about function code. It should be painfully obvious to anyone that if you opt to leverage other AWS services that those are things you would ultimately have to replace but those decisions have nothing to do with serverless.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#612

Post by GordonS »

1337shadow wrote: post #529
raxxorrax wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-trans…

> Hosting your own server is a lot of work and isn't fun. For me it's easy because i just maintain my ansible roles. It's fun because I get to keep up with OSS and be part of an amazing community. And I get much better hardware for the price.

I've looked an Ansible a couple of times, but I always think it looks too verbose, but more than that the way files for the same thing are spread out across multiple folders just makes it seem like there is a steep learning curve. Something like Ansible sounds great, but it feels like learning it would be a chore.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#613

Post by GordonS »

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've used Azure's serverless offering "Functions" quite a bit. The dev experience is pretty good, actually - it "just works" - start it and point your browser at the URL. And certainly no problems setting up env vars or anything basic like that.

My only nitpick, and only specifically relating to dotnet, is that config files and env vars differ between Functions and regular ASP.NET Core web apps. I think there is some work going on to fix that, but it's taking forever.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#614

Post by GordonS »

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.

I use JetBrains Rider, rather than Visual Studio, and the dev experience is excellent, just the same as with VS.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#615

Post by fragmede »

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…

Now, whether or not you, personally, do, is entirely up to you and what you want your career trajectory to go. (Both are equally valid because internally, AWS will always needs ops people that understand computers.) However, a cottage industry of AWS Certified Solutions Architects has already sprung up, and some have been getting lucrative consulting gigs based on knowing the mismash of Amazon names and how best to mash them up.

Serverless (specifically AWS Lambda) plays a part in the cloud, but most of your objections are true of the cloud and/or AWS more broadly, and have little to do with, specifically, serverless. (Despite whatever the webdev convention was trying to sell you.) There's a whole world of EC2 instances which are mostly VPSes, to know about that definitively aren't serverless (though there are some really neat cattle-level features that serverless learns from)

If the computer is a bicycle for the mind, then the cloud is a car for the programmer's mind. You can definitely build your own stack with your own team that manages to avoids the cloud, but at some point it becomes more than one person can handle. As you scale, there's a points where the cloud does, and does not make sense, but the cloud gets you access to far more resources as a tiny team than would otherwise be available to you.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#616

Post by olyjohn »

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.

I'm not sure why that's PHP's fault? I never had problems running it locally... and to "get my code to the servers" was as easy as a git pull from the server which is probably the 2nd laziest way of accomplishing that.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#617

Post by dragonwriter »

methodin wrote: post #611
dragonwriter wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every AWS Lambda function I've ever written can be ran as a regular node/python process. The lambda-specific part is miniscule. Of the actual function code, sure. Of course, if you aren't manually configuring everything and are doing IaC, that isn't generic. And if you are supporting the Lambda with any other AWS serverless services, the code interfacing with them is pretty AWS specific.

I was only talking about function code. It should be painfully obvious to anyone that if you opt to leverage other AWS services that those are things you would ultimately have to replace but those decisions have nothing to do with serverless.

> but those decisions have nothing to do with serverless.

Sure they do.

Because if you need a DB for persistence you are either setting up a server for it (and therefore not serverless, even if part of your system uses a Lambda) or consuming a serverless DB service. And so on for other parts of the stack. On AWS, for DB, that might be Dynamo (lock-in heavy) or, say, Aurora Serverless (no real lock-in if you don't use the RDS Data API but instead use the normal MySQL or Postgres API, but that's higher friction—more involved VPC setup—to use from Lambda than RDS Data API is, so the path of least resistance leads to lockin.)

Lambda or other FaaS is often part of a serverless solution, but is rarely a serverless solution by itself.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#618

Post by robertlagrant »

demosito666 wrote: post #433
nullsense wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

The magic is in knowing which trivial API commands to call to make the infrastructure match the desired state.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#619

Post by mtnGoat »

joana035 wrote: post #571
diggan wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reading this made me remember that back in the day the AWS selling point was "here you can create virtual machines with few clicks and have it instantly instead of waiting 30 min for you colocated server to be ready" but now it seems to be "here is a bunch of random expensive tools, please, produce as much stuff as possible and share the word that having servers is bad™". This field used to be inspiring, but now I se…

"pay that much for such complexity"... FWIW, we shaved 50%+ off our compute bill and lowered complexity by moving from servers to serverless.

Just because it doesn't work for your situation doesn't mean it doesn't work at all.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#620

Post by mtnGoat »

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…

this doesnt solve the OPs problems though, if Vagrant is complex, so would be a docker image. the problem is the user doesn't know how to manage/configure the underlying complexity of the OS and needed services, which would still be a problem if using docker. unless you find that perfect docker image with every dep you need... but that would also be true with vagrant.
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