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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#341

Post by rurp »

general1465 wrote: post #243

I tried AWS serverless, figured out that it is impossible to test anything locally while you are forced to use AWS IAM role for serverless run which has access to everything. That's just a problem waiting to happen while you are always running tests on production...

I worked on a serverless project for several years and the lack of ability to run much of anything locally was a huge cost. Debugging cycle times were absolutely terrible. There are some tools that claim to address this but as of a few years ago they were all useless for a real project.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#342

Post by earnesti »

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.

No it isn't. There are many ways to put stuff on internet with guaranteed max costs.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#343

Post by earnesti »

JustExAWS wrote: post #275
McGlockenshire wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blaming the victim? stay classy. intentionally allowing huge billing by default is scummy, period.

Yes, you as a developer should know something about how the service works before you use it. I first opened the AWS console in 2016 and by then I had read about the possible gotchas.

Well, people get informed by reading these stories. So let's keep informing people to avoid AWS.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#344

Post by kyleee »

Bjartr wrote: post #301
JustExAWS wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never in 8 years of being in the AWS ecosystem and reading forums and Reddits on the internet had anyone report that AWS wouldn’t refund their money. If you go over your budget with AWS, what should AWS do automatically? Delete your objects from S3? Terminate your databases and EC2 instances? Besides, billing data collection doesn’t happen anywhere near realtime, consider it a fire hose of streaming data that…

Provide the user the tools to make these choices. Give the option to explicitly choose how durable to extreme traffic you want to be. Have the free tier default to "not very durable"

Bam, you said. They’d do it if they cared, but they don’t and prefer the status quo. 100k surprise bill is the type of thing people kill themselves over. Horrific

Re: Serverless Horrors

#345

Post by Nextgrid »

kikki wrote: post #295
princevegeta89 wrote: post #201

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 thing…

Why was your PM making tech decisions?

Looks like you need the "quiet part" said out loud:

Chances are, the company was fishing for (or at least wouldn't mind) VC investment, which requires things being built a certain (complex and expensive) way like the top "startups" that recently got lots of VC funding.

Chances are, the company wanted an invite to a cloud provider's conference so they could brag about their (self-inflicted) problems and attract visibility (potentially translates to investment - see previous point).

Chances are, a lot of their engineering staff wanted certain resume points to potentially be able to work at such startups in the future.

Chances are, the company wanted some stories about how they're modern and "cloud-native" and how they're solving complex (self-inflicted) problems so they can post it on their engineering blog to attract talent (see previous point).

And so on.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#346

Post by the__alchemist »

maxbond wrote: post #280
the__alchemist wrote: post #15

"Serverless" is a an Orwellian name for a server-based system!

Bit of a nit pick but this is a pet peeve of mine. Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite. There's definitely criticisms to be made of th…

Yea, I agree after more thought. I think the key is what you said; the term is useful for dividing within a specific domain. People outside that domain see the word and think "those guys are calling this Category-A thing "not-category-A", that makes no sense! Inside the Category A world, there is much more nuance.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#347

Post by rurp »

nostrebored wrote: post #317
general1465 wrote: post #243

I tried AWS serverless, figured out that it is impossible to test anything locally while you are forced to use AWS IAM role for serverless run which has access to everything. That's just a problem waiting to happen while you are always running tests on production...

1. Put your stuff in a stack. Deploy it to your isolated developer account. Basically free staging environment. 2. Use the officially supported docker runtime for local testing. 3. Treat it like any other code and make unit tests 4. Use one of the tools like localstack to emulate your staging env on your machine. There are so many options that I don’t know how you could walk away with your opinion.

Eh, I worked on a large serverless project that worked hard to follow best practices but it was still very clunky to run and test code locally. The local serverless tools simply didn't work for our project and they had so many limitations I'm skeptical they work for most non-prottypes.

Deploying a stack to your own developer environment works fine and is well worth doing, but the turnaround time is still painful compared to running a normal web framework project locally. Deploying a stack takes much much longer than restarting a local server.

Serverless isn't all bad, it has some nice advantages for scaling a project, but running and debugging a project locally is a definite weak spot.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#348

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

rustc wrote: post #282
JustExAWS wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You’re not “disputing it”. You were charged fair and square. You send an email to their customer support and they say “no problem” and help you prevent it in the future.

And what if they don't say "no problem"? Like the Netlify case where they at first offered a reduced bill (which was still a lot) before the post got viral and the CEO stepped in.

Then don’t use a service that has a reputation for poor customer service?

Like they use to say about IBM…

“No one ever got fired for choosing AWS (or Azure)”

Re: Serverless Horrors

#349

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

gitgud wrote: post #329
JustExAWS wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never in 8 years of being in the AWS ecosystem and reading forums and Reddits on the internet had anyone report that AWS wouldn’t refund their money. If you go over your budget with AWS, what should AWS do automatically? Delete your objects from S3? Terminate your databases and EC2 instances? Besides, billing data collection doesn’t happen anywhere near realtime, consider it a fire hose of streaming data that…

> If you go over your budget with AWS, what should AWS do automatically? Delete your objects from S3? Terminate your databases and EC2 instances? Why not simply take the service offline once it reaches the free tier limit?? The reason why is that AWS is greedy, and would rather force you to become a paid customer…

How do you take your S3 service offline when they charge for storage or your EBS volumes? Your databases?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#350

Post by jay_kyburz »

sbarre wrote: post #114
appreciatorBus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren’t limits though, they are just budget notifications. What would be helpful, would be if when you set up your account there was a default limit – as in an actual limit, where all projects stop working once you go over it - of some sane amount like $5 or $50 or even $500. I have a handful of toy projects on AWS and Google cloud. On both I have budgets set up at $1 and $10, with notifications at 10% 50% and 9…

I feel that the likely answer here is that instrumenting real-time spending limit monitoring and cut-off at GCP/AWS scale is Complicated/Expensive to do, so they choose to not do it. I suppose you could bake the limits into each service at deploy time, but that's still a lot of code to write to provide a good experience to a customer who is trying to not pay you money. Not saying this is a good thing, but this feels…

Google App Engine had this when it first started.
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