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Author of that blog here, happy to answer any questions :)
Just curious if this workload also saw some of the same improvements (on a quick read it seems like you could have been hitting the routing problem CF mentions)
These two have resonated with me deeply. - Eliminated complex caching workarounds and data pipeline overhead - Simplified architecture from distributed system to straightforward application We, as developers/engineers (put whatever title you want), tend to make things complex for no reason sometimes. Not all systems have to follow state-of-the-art best practices. Many times, secure, stable, durable systems outperform…
But when were serverless systems like lambda and cloud workers "best practices" for low latency apis?
I think developers are drowning in tools to make things "easy", when in truth many problems are already easy with the most basic stuff in our tool belt (a compiler, some bash scripts, and some libraries). You can always build up from there. This tooling fetish hurts both companies and developers.
Yeah; IMO Docker was our last universal improvement to productivity, in 2013, and very little we've invented since then can be said to have had such a wide-ranging positive impact, with such few drawbacks. Some systems are helpful for some companies, but then try to get applied to other companies where they don't make sense and things fall apart or productivity suffers. Cloudflare and others are trying to make v8 iso…
*Terraform, imo, released in ~2014
The takeaway here isn’t that serverless doesn’t work, it’s that the authors didn’t understand what they were building on. Putting a latency-critical API on a stateless edge runtime was a rookie mistake, and the pain they describe was entirely predictable.
Personally, I appreciate the info and the admission.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah; IMO Docker was our last universal improvement to productivity, in 2013, and very little we've invented since then can be said to have had such a wide-ranging positive impact, with such few drawbacks. Some systems are helpful for some companies, but then try to get applied to other companies where they don't make sense and things fall apart or productivity suffers. Cloudflare and others are trying to make v8 iso…
Docker + IaC* for me; git ops, immutable servers, immutable code, immutable config, (nearly) immutable infrastructure means I haven't had to drop to the command line on a server since 2015. If something is wrong you restart the container, if that doesn't work you restart the host it's running on. The "downside" to this is my "admin" shell skills outside of personal dev laptop commands have gotten rusty. *Terraform, i…
Haha, lucky you. If only world was this beautiful :) I regularly shell into Kubernetes nodes to debug memory leaks from non-limited pods, or to check some strange network issues.
I think developers are drowning in tools to make things "easy", when in truth many problems are already easy with the most basic stuff in our tool belt (a compiler, some bash scripts, and some libraries). You can always build up from there. This tooling fetish hurts both companies and developers.
Excerpt AWS lambda is stupidly cheap!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But when were serverless systems like lambda and cloud workers "best practices" for low latency apis?
According to their marketing material, when they started supporting running in edge pop's, they became the best option for low-latency APIs.
Adding that much compute to an edge POP is a big lift; even firecracker gets heavy at scale. And security risk for executing arbitrary code since these POPs don't have near the physical security of a datacenter, small scale makes more vulnerable to timing attacks, etc.
I think developers are drowning in tools to make things "easy", when in truth many problems are already easy with the most basic stuff in our tool belt (a compiler, some bash scripts, and some libraries). You can always build up from there. This tooling fetish hurts both companies and developers.