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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#641

Post by rytemporal »

m_mueller wrote: post #588
beagle3 wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of https://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01... - you pay an extremely high cost upfront without even noticing - for the promise that at some point, you'll be able to scale out to any scale, with no extra human effort and for costs proportional to the scale. I have not observed enough uses of serverless I can draw conclusions from, but if it's anywhere like hadoop style scaling, 95% o…

It depends. Give you an example: We have an expensive reporting workflow that needs considerable resources, but usually only once a month. Two ways to do this cost effectively: Scale down containers to zero, meaning several minutes of response time if you do need it ad-hoc sometime. At least as complex to configure. OR you fit it to AWS SAM. The latter has proven to be a good match for us. I solved the debugging stor…

I’m the head of product for Temporal. You should check us out, have to self host (MIT) right now but we are working on a cloud. You can safely write code that blocks for years. No more job queues.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#642

Post by robertlagrant »

molf wrote: post #453
zelly wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not nuts to run servers. If an application is operating at any scale such that there is a nonstop stream of requests, then it will be cheaper, faster, and more energy-efficient to run a hot server. This follows from thermodynamics. No matter how good the cloud vendor's serverless is, it's always going to be less efficient than a server, unless it doesn't do any setup and teardown (i.e. no longer server less ). I…

> Serverless won't be profitable because the people who need it don't make money. You seem to implying only applications with huge numbers of users can be profitable. This statement ignores a tremendous amount of (typically B2B) applications that provide enormous value for their users but don't see a lot of traffic. I have worked on applications that are at the core of profitable businesses yet they can go days, in s…

I don't think that's necessarily true. Google Cloud functions give you 2 million invocations free a month - that's almost 1 per second. You can keep adding another 2 million for $0.40 at a time. It's not terrible.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#643

Post by nullsense »

mjayhn wrote: post #637
mjayhn wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might really like pulumi. I'm kind of on the opposite end, ops>swe so tons of IAC and i'm using pulumi now as I'm more swe focused https://www.pulumi.com/ (ive no relation to them)

I'm late but can't edit, if anyones curious I just found a great article on it; https://itnext.io/getting-started-with-pulumi-sdk-22dc0b7ab8...

Basically exact same as CDK. I really prefer this style over CloudFormation and Terraform. I think Pulumi emerging as another player in the space legitimizes the approach.

CDK is moving quite fast and not all parts are out of the experimental phase, so there are breaking changes shipped often. I think in a couple of years it will stabilize and mature and become a very productive way of working with infrastructure.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#644

Post by nicbou »

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

The HDD died already. I opened it, moved the stuck head with my fingers and shoved it back in. I have good backups, and as someone else said, if it was important, it would not run on a recycled laptop behind my desk.

That hard drive event showed me how disposable the machine itself has become thanks to docker.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#645

Post by gokceozantoptas »

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…

Serverless (as far as I can understand) is what we can consider as the early stages of the commoditization of compute. Meaning, similar to electricity or tap water, at some point in our lives we will subscribe to a provider and then just plug and play whatever we want to. It is just we are in the early stages.

If you are interested in these kind of stuff, maybe take a look at Wardley Maps: https://medium.com/wardleymaps

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#646

Post by Simon321 »

pbalau wrote: post #246
tybit wrote: post #225

I don’t believe that the FaaS revolution has stalled, though I fear it will follow the tech adoption curve because people are over hyping it. I do wonder if AWS’s leadership in the area has stalled though. GCP has innovated with their hybrid Cloud Run to allow running more traditional apps in a serverless way. Azure and CloudFlare have paved the way to what I believe is the future with stateful functions with Durable…

> GCP has innovated with their hybrid Cloud Run to allow running more traditional apps in a serverless way. AWS has Fargate, run your containers without caring where they run.

it doesn't scale down to zero and the startup time is too long

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#647

Post by nicbou »

k__ wrote: post #586
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. There is still a lot of work to do if you host on something on such an infrastructure." So true. I really want to know how many of these "I host my own stuff"-people keep all there systems up to date. Updates, security patches etc.

That's a command or two every week or two. I was not exaggerating when I said my house plants require more maintenance than that.

Running a server has been a non-issue for years for me.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#648

Post by oblio »

nicbou wrote: post #644
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

The HDD died already. I opened it, moved the stuck head with my fingers and shoved it back in. I have good backups, and as someone else said, if it was important, it would not run on a recycled laptop behind my desk. That hard drive event showed me how disposable the machine itself has become thanks to docker.

You missed the point though. Serverless offers are commercial. They have little in common with your home made hobby stuff.

How much would you even pay for hosting? $2 a month?

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#649

Post by collyw »

gimboland wrote: post #561
collyw wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can reproduce that environment locally. Often useful for fixing bugs.

Also useful for doing the development in the first place!

Kubernetes, microservices, distributed systems, SPA apps. Getting a development environment to reproduce bugs takes up so much of my time these days (a fair bit is because of our crappy system, but there also a lot of inherent complexity in the system because of the architecture choices listed above). We get the promise of scaling, but most places making these choices don't actually need it.
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