Live data from Hacker News

Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

techcrunch.com

11–20 of 204 posts

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#11
post #8
post #2

Here's to hoping ignoring serverless will work as well as ignoring NoSQL worked for me.

Serverless is at its heart - as I understand it - a dockerized microservice, abstracted away to a degree that the developer no longer has to think about anything but his application code. You'll definitely be able to ignore it and it probably won't be used in smallish companies for ages. It's just an easier way to to get your application to scale than homebuild docker images were.

> no longer has to think about anything but his application code.

i mean, CGI has always existed. This serverless hype is basically rebrand of CGI with some fancy orchestration around autoscaling across boxes (which, tbh, isn't really that much work, and most people don't need the scale required to make this feasible anyway).

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#12
post #7
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But don't you want perfect elastic scalability for your blockchain^W distributed ledger project? /s

You forgot the AI part...

How about visualizing the realtime graph with VR? There, I tied it all in.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#13
Congratulations to Austen and Serverless Inc. for raising an additional 10m dollars. From what I've seen they are all very nice people over at Serverless.

I've been running a small service similar to their new "Serverless Platform" for some time and was approached by them in 2014 to see about joining their team.

Ultimately I ended up deciding not to join because I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineering presence in their leadership to make a good product. The next couple of years should be interesting to watch if they can actually build a profitable product.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did not Google already make a cloud platform that is cloud agnostic called OpenCloud which is a better name that doesn't target just "Serverless" aka Azure Functions, Amazon Lambdas. The use of "Serverless" is not having to deal with an "IT" guy at all who complains about setting up your app cause you updated the STACK and now it collides with everything else on the same server. Also makes it so you don't necessarily…

I think the problem is all of this tooling (Docker, Serverless, NoSQL) has been created to “support developer velocity”, which really just ends up as technical debt. You can’t magic away the need for experience and domain knowledge. Docker doesn’t replace the need to know how VMs work. Containers don’t magically allow you to scale to infinity (Although k8s shows a lot of potential). And you probably should be using P…

I am learning this lesson the hard way with dynamically typed languages on the server. If the documentation and database have to be statically typed, you should really use types in the code. So dynamically typed languages on the server is impossible (?).

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#15
post #8
post #2

Here's to hoping ignoring serverless will work as well as ignoring NoSQL worked for me.

Serverless is at its heart - as I understand it - a dockerized microservice, abstracted away to a degree that the developer no longer has to think about anything but his application code. You'll definitely be able to ignore it and it probably won't be used in smallish companies for ages. It's just an easier way to to get your application to scale than homebuild docker images were.

"a degree that the developer no longer has to think about anything but his application code."

a developer still has to understand the implications of resource consumption etc. For performance-critical pieces of code, IMO it's better to have direct access to the hardware - I had a recent first hand experience with this debugging NUMA related performance issue.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#16
I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures. I recently developed a service[1] with the serverless framework and it was the first time I enjoyed developing server-side code since the era of PHP on shared hosts, where you could just upload code and refresh the page. There's something freeing about never having to think about the server process or what happens if the server is power cycled.

So congrats on the funding, I hope you can convert some haters :)

[1] obligatory plug: https://notify.run

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serverless is at its heart - as I understand it - a dockerized microservice, abstracted away to a degree that the developer no longer has to think about anything but his application code. You'll definitely be able to ignore it and it probably won't be used in smallish companies for ages. It's just an easier way to to get your application to scale than homebuild docker images were.

"a degree that the developer no longer has to think about anything but his application code." a developer still has to understand the implications of resource consumption etc. For performance-critical pieces of code, IMO it's better to have direct access to the hardware - I had a recent first hand experience with this debugging NUMA related performance issue.

Is there a performance-critical case that isn't already ruled out by the Lambda cold boot problem though?

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#18
post #2

Here's to hoping ignoring serverless will work as well as ignoring NoSQL worked for me.

NoSQL has been and continues to be hugely influential. All major cloud players provide document/object based storage, as well as other NoSQL Solutions. The term "NoSQL" was dumb and overhyped... But I think it's really about using the correct storage solution for the job.

Non relational data should be stored in a non rdbms. Key-Value stores like Redis are immensely useful as caching layers (but they offer so many more features). Graph databases can be used for data with complex relationships that are not easily modeled. They are also good for seeking strong correlations between related items. (think person A. called person B. called person C. (palantir type searches).). Searches can be done way more effectively in a specialized index, like an inverted index used by lucene/elasticsearch, which also supports things like stemming, synonyms, and numerous other features. These are all "NoSQL" NoSQL is not just mongodb (which isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be btw).

Even traditional RDBMS are seeing an influx of NOSQLesque features. Like JSON types and operations in postgres.

The reason "NoSQL" dbs got popular are because in my experience monolithic large relational databases are hard to scale, and manage once they become too complex. When you have one large database with tons of interdependencies, it makes migrating data, and making schema changes much harder. This in my opinion is the biggest issue (moreso than performance problems associated with doing joins to the n-th degree., which is also an issue.)

It also makes separating concerns of the application more difficult when one SQL connection can query/join all entities. In theory better application design would have separate upstream data services fetch the resources they are responsible for. That data can be stored in a RDBMS or NOSQL, but NOSQL forces your hand in that direction.

As it goes for serverless, this just seems like a natural progression from containerization, I'm interested to see where the space goes.

Personally I think it's foolish to put your head in the sand when the industry is changing, or learning new concepts.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#19
post #16

I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures. I recently developed a service[1] with the serverless framework and it was the first time I enjoyed developing server-side code since the era of PHP on shared hosts, where you could just upload code and refresh the page. There's something freeing about never having to think about the server process or what happens if the server is po…

I just hope the API has stabilized. I worked on a project a couple of years ago using serverless, and we sunk a ton of time into fixing breaking changes after updates.

Re: Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform

#20
post #16

I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures. I recently developed a service[1] with the serverless framework and it was the first time I enjoyed developing server-side code since the era of PHP on shared hosts, where you could just upload code and refresh the page. There's something freeing about never having to think about the server process or what happens if the server is po…

I think a lot of people have tried “serverless” and found it to present more challenges than it solves. How, for example, do you connect to a Postgres database from Lambda/Cloud Functions? As far as I can tell, the answer is: You don’t, you use a different database.

No-worries devops experiences are nothing new. See Heroku.

Post reply on HN