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Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

unkey.com

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Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#101
post #2

Their problem isn't serverless, rather Cloudflare Workers and WebAssembly. All major cloud vendors have serveless solutions based on containers, with longer managed lifetimes between requests, and naturally the ability to use properly AOT compiled languages on the containers.

Indeed.

They get to the bottom of the post and drop:

> Fargate handles scaling for us without the serverless constraints

They dropped workers for containers.

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#102
post #87

As someone who worked with serverless for multiple years (mostly amazon lambda but others too) i can absolutely apporove the authors points. While it "takes away" some work from you, it adds this work on other points to solve the "artificial induced problems". Another example i hit was a hard upload limit. Ported an application to a serverless variant, had an import API for huge customer exports. Shouldnt be a proble…

The way to work around this issue is to provide a presigned S3 url Have the users upload to s3 directly and then they can either POST you what they uploaded or you can find some other means of correlating the input (eg: files in s3 are prefixed with the request id or something) I agree this is annoying and maybe I’ve been in AWS ecosystem for too long. However having an API that accepts an unbounded amount of data is…

Well i partly agree, and if i would be the one building the counterpart, i prolly had used presigned s3 urls also.

In this specific case im getting oldschool file upload request from software that was partly written before the 2000s - noones gonne adjust anything any more.

And ye, just accepting giant size uploads is far from good in terms of "Security" like DoS - but ye we talking about stupidly somewhere between 100 and 300mb CSV files (called them "huge" because in terms of product data 200-300mb text include quite alot) - not great but well we try to satisfy our customers needs.

But ye like all the other points - everything is solvable somehow - just needs us to spend more time to solve something that technickly wasn't a real problem in first place.

Edit: Another funny example. In a similar process on another provider i downloaded files in a similar size range from S3 to parse them - which died again and again. After contacting the hoster, because their logs litearlly just stopped no error tracing nothing) they told me that basically their setup only allows for 10mb local storing - and the default (in this case aws s3 adapter for PHP) always downloads it even if you tell it to "stream". So i build a solution that used HTTP ranged requests to "fake stream" the file into memory in smaller chunks so i could process it afterwards without completely download it. Just another example of : yes its solvable, but annoying.

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#103
post #100

Like the article says, I think serverless has it's place, but I don't think it's for most applications. I can't see myself _ever_ using serverless services as a core part of my application for pretty much any startup, if I can avoid it. The infrastructure overhead is actually worse, IMO. Everything is so platform specific and it's much stranger to test and develop against locally. Each platform has a different way to…

Let me tell you about all the fun I'm having trying to execute my amazon lambda app locally so I can test before deploying...

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#104

Linux servers running Go apps? Would be nice to see server cost and specs, backup strategy, etc.

They just use two servers and configure a loadbalancer within Cloudflare. Come on. Self-Hosting is no rocket science. You don‘t have to make it seem complicated. People have been doing this decades before AWS invented serverless.

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#105
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that the bill would be that much cheaper, nonetheless thanks for making me aware they are a thing now.

They're much cheaper, they're just DOs, and they get billed as such. They also have faster cold start times and automatic multi-region support.

What does DO mean in this context?

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#109
post #10

Somewhere in Denmark, DHH is smiling

I often don't know what to make of DHH. He's a living contradiction. On one hand he will continually rant about how bad the overhead and waste of cloud services is, and on the other hand he will staunchly defend the most inefficient programming language that is regularly used for backend development, as well as defend the enourmous overfetching that active record leads to.

Really I think DHH just likes to tell others what he likes.

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#110
post #104

Linux servers running Go apps? Would be nice to see server cost and specs, backup strategy, etc.

They just use two servers and configure a loadbalancer within Cloudflare. Come on. Self-Hosting is no rocket science. You don‘t have to make it seem complicated. People have been doing this decades before AWS invented serverless.

Yet, idiots remain.
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