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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#651

Post by habosa »

randomsearch wrote: post #410
habosa wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely doesn’t have to be that way. I work on Firebase and I’ve spent most of the last year specifically working on our local development experience for our serverless backend products: https://firebase.google.com/docs/emulator-suite Still very actively working on this but our goal is that nobody ever has to test via deploy again.

Love firebase, thanks for your work! the local emulator suite is so important a feature and keenly following your progress. Slightly OT... perhaps cheeky... any idea why firebase doesn’t provide automated backups for firestore and storage out of the box? Seems like a no brainer and a valuable service people would pay for.

We're working on Firestore backups. Haven't heard many people ask for Storage backups though ... so I don't think that's on the roadmap at the moment.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#652

Post by nicbou »

oblio wrote: post #648
nicbou wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I didn't miss the point. You singled out my ThinkPad and I'm answering your questions.

My point was about having portable code on generic hardware, which in my opinion is a better bet than writing Amazon software for Amazon servers, and praying their prices don't change much.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#653

Post by nicbou »

mtnGoat wrote: post #619
joana035 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The opposite is also true: just because it works for your situation doesn't mean it works for all of them.

It's a tool in your toolbox.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#654

Post by beagle3 »

rytemporal wrote: post #641
m_mueller wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose you mean temporal.io, but just FYI, the first google result for me was https://github.com/RTradeLtd/Temporal which is far but not far enough to be “obviously unrelated”.

You might want to give a link next time to avoid ambiguity.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#655

Post by NDizzle »

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.

It's second nature for those of us who have been doing it since the 90s. It's incredible that it's apparently becoming a lost art.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#656

Post by mtnGoat »

nicbou wrote: post #653
mtnGoat wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The opposite is also true: just because it works for your situation doesn't mean it works for all of them. It's a tool in your toolbox.

absolutely agreed! we still have ec2 stances and workload, but for some stuff it was the perfect solution.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#658

Post by time0ut »

dolni wrote: post #555
time0ut wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lambda has pretty good support for versioning and aliasing so you can control that sort of roll out.

Sure you can do that, and that works ok in some scenarios. But there are some problems. In a scenario like: > Now I have one lambda that gets pointed at a new record stream from an S3 bucket, and I'm done. Ok, so you got AWS set up to fire your Lambda when an object is created in an S3 bucket. You decide you need another "stream", we'll call it, so you start dumping stuff into another prefix. How does one go about te…

Sure. Lambda isn't great. There are trade offs.

I'm not gonna try and say that it should replace containerized applications (I would choose those 9 times out of 10 given the choice). Unfortunately, there are cases where there isn't a choice or Lambda is still a good choice (like maybe the grandparent's image resize thing, probably depends on a lot of things).

I tend to think of a Lambda as a custom piece of cloud infrastructure. So, in addition to unit tests, I just test them like I would any other Terraform module. I use Terratest to deploy a stack containing the resource under test and a surrounding harness. In this case, maybe the Lambda, a source bucket, a destination bucket, a DLQ, logs, etc. Then execute my test cases, poll for results, do assertions, etc. When it's done, Terratest destroys the stack.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#659

Post by gobengo »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #95

An interesting rant to be sure, but what the author misses (in my opinion of course) that serverless isn't new, it just isn't recognized by a lot of programmers for what it is. Serverless computing is exactly mainframe computing. And by exactly I mean exactly. You see when I was taking CS classes for my degree students bought something called "kilocoreseconds" (kCs) and they are exactly what they sound like, they are…

I agree. You might like working on the Internet Computer with former IBM Researchers at https://github.com/dfinity.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#660

Post by Animats »

gitgud wrote: post #296
qayxc wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you forgot that always-on server it lives on. The idea behind serverless includes the fact that you don't pay for what you don't use. So if no requests are served, you owe nothing. Your FCGI solution shuts down idle copies, but keeps the server running...

> But you forgot that always-on server it lives on. A better comparison would be "Serverless" is "FCGI in shared environment"... if such a thing exists...

That's still available from many hosting providers. It's very cheap. I run Go programs that way on Dreamhost. You're not stuck in the Perl era. I compile the executables on a Linux desktop and push them to the server. Costs under US$10/month. You can probably do 10-100 transactions per second.
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