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Serverless Architectures

martinfowler.com

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Re: Serverless Architectures

#11

Post by icebraining »

marktangotango wrote: post #9
Spearchucker wrote: post #3

The API gateway made me smile. In the 90's we had message queues. In the 00's we had service busses. Today we have API gateways. All they do is route requests - they're all the same thing. There's merit in serverless, no doubt. There are many things that worry me. Not owning the infrastructure means I don't get the telemetry I'd like, making triage difficult. Direct access to the database is a good idea said nobody e…

The vast majority of web sites on the internet today don't need much infrastructure, they're low traffic blogs, web sites for the hair salon down the street, or a landing page for a non software corporation. Facebook fills this role for a lot users, and they in turn sacrifice their data and privacy to a souless corporation. Don't forget the $billions dollars industry of shared hosting providers out there. A lot of bu…

FAAS and mBAAS still cost resources, so they still cost money, and someone has to pay for that. If you're hosting a low traffic, mostly static site, I think you're better off paying $18/y on NearlyFreeSpeech (for a dynamic site with a database), where you are actually a client, than relying on the freemium plan from a cloud service for which you are just a prospect.

Re: Serverless Architectures

#13

Post by jtwaleson »

If your PaaS supports scaling down to zero (Heroku free tier, Cloud Foundry somewhere in the future) and resuming on incoming traffic, it's basically a much better version of FaaS. The way you deploy code, the way services are coupled to the app etc is much better.

Re: Serverless Architectures

#14

Post by gmazza »

Serverless = new name for PaaS.

VPS (virtual private servers) were available (and largely ignored) for quite a while before 2006, when AWS came along with the catchy word "cloud". This single word changed everything. Same technology all of the sudden became cool, and everybody started using it.

Maybe now it is the turn of PaaS [1] - call it "serverless" and folks finally start seeing all the benefits (true scalability, efficient resource utilization, timely and painless software upgrades, et c.)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service

Re: Serverless Architectures

#15

Post by TorKlingberg »

Is Google App Engine an example of serverless? The user does not really think about servers, and the code is mostly written as event handlers. The abstraction is a bit leaky though, and you can tell that there are instances being spun up and down.

Re: Serverless Architectures

#17

Post by dingaling »

kabes wrote: post #5

How did this came to be known as serverless? It just seems to be an extreme case of microservices running on someone else's computer?

> How did this came to be known as serverless?

Indeed, 'blameless' would seem more appropriate.

All the best trying to recover a 'serverless' application when one portion fails; lots of late-night phone-calls and picking-through the terms of SLA documents in that future compunded by the fact that most serverless advocates say that you can dispense with operations staff...

Re: Serverless Architectures

#18

Post by LionessLover »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #15

Is Google App Engine an example of serverless? The user does not really think about servers, and the code is mostly written as event handlers. The abstraction is a bit leaky though, and you can tell that there are instances being spun up and down.

Terms such as "serverless" don't have a fixed sharp-edged meaning but are very fuzzy categories, except on a per-person basis, where you may (will) find people insisting on a specific meaning. When this story was submitted on some reddit forum (forgot which one) everybody was up in arms after just reading the headline, screaming "everything is a server" and "there is no cloud"! Don't take it too seriously. Human language is very deliberately a very flexible tool, with the same word fitting into very different contexts, taking on very different roles. Even in science, by the way.

Re: Serverless Architectures

#19

Post by LionessLover »

amelius wrote: post #16

The article totally skips (serverless) federated architectures, which are more interesting, in my opinion.

At the bottom of the article:

> This is an evolving publication, and I shall be extending it over the coming days and weeks to cover more topics on serverless architecture including some things commonly confused with serverless, and the benefits and drawbacks of this approach.

You can send a tweet to the author: https://twitter.com/mikebroberts

Re: Serverless Architectures

#20

Post by Skinney »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #15

Is Google App Engine an example of serverless? The user does not really think about servers, and the code is mostly written as event handlers. The abstraction is a bit leaky though, and you can tell that there are instances being spun up and down.

Depends on what you mean by serverless I guess. GAE (and Heroku for that matter) still has the notion of code running on an instance, dyno, server whatever. When I think of serverless, I think of Azure Functions, AWS Lambda and the like, where the cloud runs a single function in response to a request. How is it run? Doesn't matter, you pay for what you use.
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