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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#661

Post by com2kid »

iudqnolq wrote: post #533
iudqnolq wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Eh, you win some you lose some.

Being able to throw up a new REST endpoint in under 10 minutes with 0 config is really cool though.

And Firebase Functions are priced to work as daily drivers, they can front an entire application and not cost an insane amount of $, per single ms pricing. Lambda's are a lot more complicated.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#662

Post by 1337shadow »

vinceguidry wrote: post #582
1337shadow wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you want more fun stand up your own k8s cluster.

Actually I have and I love it, when I need more than 99.9% uptime and/or clustering.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#663

Post by 1337shadow »

GordonS wrote: post #612
1337shadow wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It doesn't matter if you use Ansible, something else, or something you made yourself to your own taste.

The tool doesn't matter, it's the practice that matters ;)

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#664

Post by Bluestein »

NDizzle wrote: post #655
k__ wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Indeed. Kind of reminds me of that sayin' about how "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn't exist ..."

Sometimes I think it is a great trick some big players are pulling off, in convincing the world to subsidize their infrastructure costs (and more than that) by using their resources because it is "simpler" or more effective or alternatives are hard, etc ...

... to where the ability to competently setup and maintain those services will vanish, in due time. (Which, of course would only help to consolidate those -already- running such systems ...)

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#665

Post by rektide »

ethbr0 wrote: post #209
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is shaping up to be Oracle 2.0. That isn't a compliment.

Given an opportunity to milk existing, locked-in customers in lieu of investing in R&D and new products, few leadership teams can resist. Time will tell.

aws's whole pitch has been cutting out server huggers & engineers, relying on aws. since day 1. often to wonderful effect. with far far better software programmability than our old crufty ways.

but lambda gets to the point where there is no local parity, where it's detached, is no longer an easier managed (remotely operated) parallel to what we know & do, but is a system entirely into itself, playing by different rules. one must trust the cloud-native experience it brings entirely, versus the historical past where the cloud offered native local parallels.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#666

Post by vizually »

Serverless is great or it sucks are extreme viewpoints. Reality is somewhere in the middle. For some specific use cases, (image manipulation, Alexa skills, etc.) serverless is fantastic. Dealing with persistent storage and DBs is challenging. But continues to evolve.

Managing server fleets and keeping them patched is no small feat. How much of the productivity can we gain if we didn't have to do all that with serverless? It's not possible for all use cases today. But can we move from say less than 5% of the use cases today to say, 40-50% of the use cases in another 5 years?

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#667

Post by daxfohl »

liv-io wrote: post #578
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…

Your response made me smile. Glad to see there are still reasonable folks out there. Working for a startup without a "resume-driven-development" CTO gave me the freedom to go "servermore" architecture with max flexibility.

For all the talk about resume driven development, I am hiring now, and will say that people who have solved their problems by learning more about Linux and such sound way more impressive than those who list out passing familiarity with a bunch of high level services. The first style of resume really stands out. The second is a dime a dozen.

To make an analogy, it's like hiring a carpenter based on the number of tools they have. NO. Show me your skill with a hammer and chisel, and I'll assume you can figure out the rest.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#668

Post by ben_w »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #466
nautilus12 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we can just stick my flavor of the month js library on lambda and bobs your uncle

who is bob?????

The phrase “Bob’s your uncle” is an idiom, not a specific or placeholder person as per Alice & Bob: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob's_your_uncle

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#669

Post by ko5ta »

jononor wrote: post #541
gorbypark wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google Cloud Run to run my serverless code for exactly this reason. GCR is literally just a container that runs on demand (with scaling to 0). Literally the only GCR specific part is making sure the service listens on the PORT env. If I was so inclined, I could deploy the exact same container on any number of services, host it myself and/or run it on my laptop for development purposes. There's also Kubernetes K…

How is the spin-up time for such a container?

It varies massively based on the tech stack. I have seen both simple Spring Boot and Quarkus apps take in excess of 10 seconds to start up in JVM mode. However, Quarkus compiled to native binary with GraalVM starts consistently under a second (in the ~500ms range). This is still brutal compared to running it on a vanilla MacBook which usually takes less than 20ms.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#670

Post by dzamo_norton »

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 really not that bad. Most of the investment is early on, after that servers just run. I use unattended updates to keep patches coming in while I'm doing other stuff. Updating from a Debian stable repo won't break your stuff.
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