Serverless Horrors

#1

Post by franciscop » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 1:31 AM UTC

Serverless Horrors
serverlesshorrors.com

Re: Serverless Horrors

#2

Post by crooked-v » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 6:57 AM UTC

Also see the Netlify comment thread linked from one of the Reddit posts (https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-...), where one of their representatives specifically says that if you suffer a DDOS they will do nothing to stop you from getting a bajillion-dollar bandwidth bill, even if you're on the "free" tier.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#3

Post by LAC-Tech » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 7:12 AM UTC

On the one hand I am glad to see sceptisim of serverless gaining mainstream acceptance.

On the otherhand, I fear it will just turn into an unreasoned backlash against technology that is often useful if not as often as its early proponents said it would be (See NoSQL).

Re: Serverless Horrors

#4

Post by voidwtf » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 7:12 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #2

Also see the Netlify comment thread linked from one of the Reddit posts ( https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-... ), where one of their representatives specifically says that if you suffer a DDOS they will do nothing to stop you from getting a bajillion-dollar bandwidth bill, even if you're on the "free" tier.

That's my favorite thing about all these services. None of them have an equivalent of a stop-loss. They'll notify you IF you setup an alert, but that's it. Often times the alerts are way after the damage is done, with some billable metrics often lagging in reporting/alerting by hours. The default should be safe with easy options to increase the limits.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#5

Post by tisc » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 7:12 AM UTC

Costing money is one thing, but not throttling a queue consuming serverless function and effectively DDOSsing yourself is the true horror story working with serverless :)

Re: Serverless Horrors

#6

Post by huijzer » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 7:15 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #2

Also see the Netlify comment thread linked from one of the Reddit posts ( https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-... ), where one of their representatives specifically says that if you suffer a DDOS they will do nothing to stop you from getting a bajillion-dollar bandwidth bill, even if you're on the "free" tier.

I wonder whether they are running out of money which then causes these things. Netlify used to be a very nice and unique service, but then came GitHub, GitLab and Cloudflare Pages who all provide roughly the same services for less money.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#7

Post by usr1106 » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 7:23 AM UTC

How is no spending limit a serverless problem?

It's a cloud problem.

Edit: Well, if you have small cloud servers they might go down under an attack. And if you pay only outgoing like in AWS that's good for you.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#8

Post by bigiain » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 7:29 AM UTC

tisc wrote: post #5

Costing money is one thing, but not throttling a queue consuming serverless function and effectively DDOSsing yourself is the true horror story working with serverless :)

That's kinda not "server less" specific though.

There's no end of stories of people discovering 10s to thousand in bill run up on AWS (ir Azure or GCP) because they foot gunned themselves and didn't set up alerts and/or automated service suspension using the cloud providers available tools.

Part of me thinks you shouldn't be allowed to provision EC2/S3/Lambda/whatever without first having set up a Cloudwatch alert and a rule to stop your service if your bill goes past expected/acceptable limits.

Of course Amazon (or Microsoft or Google) could make that _way_ easier than they do. It'd be nice if there was a simple form in your account setting where you could configure it to suspend services if your projected monthly bill passed $limit.

I think it's a more generic "horror story of working with other people's computers".

Re: Serverless Horrors

#9

Post by 000ooo000 » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 7:35 AM UTC

Something feels a bit off about the creator of this site also pushing a competitor. On one hand, they're upfront about it, and on the other.. they're upfront about it. At least it might prompt the companies in question to be a bit less scummy.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#10

Post by hamoodhabibi » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 7:55 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #2

Also see the Netlify comment thread linked from one of the Reddit posts ( https://answers.netlify.com/t/limit-bandwidth-to-avoid-high-... ), where one of their representatives specifically says that if you suffer a DDOS they will do nothing to stop you from getting a bajillion-dollar bandwidth bill, even if you're on the "free" tier.

It used to be we will take your server down. Now its we'll DDOS your serverless website and leave you a 100k bill.

I'm not sure how sustainable such business model is. When you owned the server, you could unplug it. Now you have no way of knowing if somebody is going to hit your /api a million times per minute