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Serverless Horrors

serverlesshorrors.com

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#201

Post by princevegeta89 »

In my experience: Fuck serverless.

If we're building anything bigger than a random script that does a small unit of work, never go for serverless. A company I recently worked for went with Serverless claiming that it would be less maintenance and overhead.

It absolutely was the worst thing I've ever seen at work. Our application state belonged at different places, we had to deal with many workarounds for simple things like error monitoring, logging, caching etc. Since there was no specific instance running our production code there was no visibility into our actual app configuration in production as well. Small and trivial things that you do in a minute in a platform like Ruby on Rails or Django would take hours if not days to achieve within this so-called blistering serverless setup.

On top of it, we had to go with DB providers like NeonDb and suffer from a massive latency. Add cold starts on top of this and the entire thing was a massive shitshow. Our idiot of a PM kept insisting that we keep serverless despite having all these problems. It was so painful and stupid overall.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#202

Post by mlhpdx »

ctvo wrote: post #68
phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

I took a workshop class and was told to setup a track saw. The course didn't bother explaining how to utilize it properly or protect yourself. I ended up losing a finger. I truly hate Stanley Tools with a passion and if I ever need to use another track saw, I'll use someone else.

This is a good analogy. When you use a tool you are responsible for what it does.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#203

Post by wredcoll »

alberth wrote: post #136
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "refund after overcharge" things are not without benefit to the corporations. They get a nice tax write-off. It's couch-cushion change for them, but it adds up. They have whole armies of beancounters, dreaming this stuff up. It's also the game behind those "coupons" you get, for outrageously-priced meds that aren't covered by insurance. If they charge $1,000 for the medication, but give you a "special discount"…

I’m fairly certain that’s incorrect . Businesses are only taxed on actual revenue earned. What you decide to charge—whether $100, $50, or even giving it away for free—is purely a business decision, not a tax one. — This is different from a nonprofit donation scenario though. For example, if your service normally costs $X but you choose to provide it for free (or at a discount) as a donation to a non-profit, you can t…

> Businesses are only taxed on actual revenue earned.

I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of hn speculation, but if another entity owes you 100k, and they go bankrupt, there absolutely are tax implications.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#204

Post by cuu508 »

mlhpdx wrote: post #200
cuu508 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dangerous technology and technology that people trust with their life Software runs on so many things we depend on IMO it also in many cases falls in the "dangerous technology" category. Non-hobby OSes, non-hobby web browsers, device drivers, software that runs critical infrastructure, software that runs on network equipment, software that handles personal data, --IMHO it would not be unreasonable to require formal…

If I go buy a TIG welder, use it without any training, leave it on and go get coffee, do I get to complain that I have to pay for a new house?

Sorry, I do not understand. What is your point?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#205

Post by mlhpdx »

hamdingers wrote: post #80
ctvo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a workshop class and was told to setup a track saw. The course didn't bother explaining how to utilize it properly or protect yourself. I ended up losing a finger. I truly hate Stanley Tools with a passion and if I ever need to use another track saw, I'll use someone else.

This analogy would make sense if the saw lacked a basic and obvious safety feature (billing limits) because Stanley profited immensely from cutting your finger off.

What seems like a basic feature to you is a hindrance to me. I don’t want to have to disable “safeguards” all over the place just because of loud and rare complaints.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#207

Post by herpdyderp »

acoustics wrote: post #188

The assignment of blame for misconfigured cloud infra or DOS attacks is so interesting to me. There don't seem to be many principles at play, it's all fluid and contingent. Customers demand frictionless tools for automatically spinning up a bunch of real-world hardware. If you put this in the hands of inexperienced people, they will mess up and end up with huge bills, and you take a reputational hit for demanding tho…

The solution is simple: budget caps.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#208

Post by VectorLock »

adhamsalama wrote: post #172
VectorLock wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not expensive for them, its expensive for their customers. If you went over your spending limit and they deleted all your shit, people would be absolutely apoplectic. Instead they make you file a relatively painless ticket and explain why you accidentally went over what you wanted to spend. This is an engineering trade-off they made to make things less painful for their customers.

They could add it as an optional limit. If it's on and is exceeded, stop everything. Surely the geniuses at Amazon (no they really are, I'm not joking) can handle it.

What about the space you're using? Do they delete it? Remove all your configurations? Prevent you from doing anything with your account until you up your limit or wait until your month resets?

If you're worried about getting a big bill, and you don't care if it gets shut off when you're not using it, why don't you shut it down yourself?

AWS made the tradeoff to keep the lights on for customers and if there is a huge bill run up unintentionally and you contact them with it they refund it. I've never experienced them not doing this when I've run up five figure bills because of a misconfiguration I didn't understand. I don't think I've ever even heard of them not refunding someone who asked them for a refund in good faith.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#209

Post by mlhpdx »

jsheard wrote: post #73
ctvo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a workshop class and was told to setup a track saw. The course didn't bother explaining how to utilize it properly or protect yourself. I ended up losing a finger. I truly hate Stanley Tools with a passion and if I ever need to use another track saw, I'll use someone else.

Protect yourself how? Most cloud providers don't support any way to immediately abort spending if things get out of hand, and when running a public-facing service there are always variables you can't control. Even if you rig up your own spending watchdog which polls the clouds billing APIs, you're still at the mercy of however long it takes for the cloud to reconcile your spending, which often takes hours or even day…

Yes, they do. You create resources and you delete resources and if you care about cost you creat alarms and tie them to scripts that automatically delete resources.

It’s basic stuff.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#210

Post by benoau »

tekno45 wrote: post #196
msh wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is irresponsible when they let people sign up for a unlimited credit. At minimum they should provide hard billing caps.

putting stuff on the internet is dangerous. if you're not prepared to secure public endpoints stop creating them.

Putting stuff on the internet is dangerous, but the absence of hard caps is a choice and it just looks like another massive tech company optimizing for their own benefit. Another example of this is smartphone games for children, it's easier for a child to spend $2,000 then it is for a parent to enforce a $20/month spending limit.
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