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Serverless Is a Scam

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Re: Serverless Is a Scam

#11

Post by anonzzzies »

magicwizardrust wrote: post #9

[flagged]

> it's going to cost me close to nothing

Until it does and then you are screwed without an easy way to get out if your application is anything else than trivial. It has it's uses; a simple page/site which won't get any users and a system that needs to elastically scale forever, but in between, you are just burning (your company) money for no reason other than HN said it is the best (a lot of people here are working at FAANG; it's baffling why anyone would take any advice from architecture ran at a company with 100k more employees than their own startup with all this cloud / devops garbage and resulting costs and headaches).

Re: Serverless Is a Scam

#12

Post by anilgulecha »

Under-rated, but probably the best serverless offering: Cloud run on GCP. Pay like for a VM, but only for the time you're getting/serving requests.

(IMO, if it can get a fly.io like command line experience, it will thrive more.)

Re: Serverless Is a Scam

#13

Post by evil-olive »

this is a fair critique of what I would call "first-gen" serverless platforms, like AWS Lambda. it's a shame that it's ~5ish years late to the party.

because "just use a container" is more or less the solution that "second-gen" serverless platforms all offer.

but also this:

> A container keeps state (just add a Docker volume!)

is just absolutely terrible as general-purpose advice.

like, yes, it can be annoying that "serverless" platforms are generally stateless, which forces you to move your state into a hosted database of some kind.

but...that reflects the underlying reality of the cloud platform. the servers that your "serverless" code runs on are generally themselves stateless.

if you were to blindly follow this "just add a Docker volume" approach to managing state, you're in for a rude awakening the moment you want to scale your "serverless" code from 1 server to 2 servers.

and unsurprisingly, the article glosses over this a few paragraphs farther down:

> You can deploy one container, or ten. Scale them. Monitor them. Keep state. Run background jobs. Use your own database.

run 10 containers...each with their own Docker volume? use my own database? what. this is blogspam nonsense.

Re: Serverless Is a Scam

#14

Post by slau »

anonzzzies wrote: post #11
magicwizardrust wrote: post #9

[flagged]

> it's going to cost me close to nothing Until it does and then you are screwed without an easy way to get out if your application is anything else than trivial. It has it's uses; a simple page/site which won't get any users and a system that needs to elastically scale forever, but in between, you are just burning (your company) money for no reason other than HN said it is the best (a lot of people here are working a…

I’m not sure I understand this argument. Anything that runs in a lambda can also be run outside of a lambda. You just need to give yourself a way to invoke it or access it.

One setup I’ve used with a previous client was deploying many FastAPI lambdas, wrapped in Mangum. You can even in the same code base expose both. This way, you can deploy to a container and a lambda without changing any code.

In one case, we used APIGWv2 to give the lambda an HTTP endpoint, in the other, it’s the container that provides it. You can throw in IPv6 support by having a CF distro in front of both.

Re: Serverless Is a Scam

#15

Post by pan69 »

The way I view serverless such as AWS Lambda, and services like SQS and SNS, in that you're supposed to use it to program the cloud environment, not to stick your business apps in it.

Re: Serverless Is a Scam

#16

Post by sebazzz »

huksley wrote: post #8

I really loved serverless for while, particularly in the early days, when building small projects. But AWS Lambdas, for example, is constant maintenance hell for larger applications, including building and dependency issues, debugging and slow deployment. One feat is still amazes me - my AWS Lambda React webapp example (Todo with server rendering) which were deployed in 2019, still works as today, and I have not chan…

Why is it a maintenance hell? You mention your app runs unchanged for six years now.

Re: Serverless Is a Scam

#18

Post by smitty1e »

I've seen small teams run fairly large stuff because serverless offloads staffing requirements.

In particular, the whole blue/green CI/CD approach makes it both trickier to know what's going on, but harder to trigger an outage.

Thus, while the complexity complaints are largely on point, to label it all a "scam" is too strident.

Re: Serverless Is a Scam

#19

Post by yesnomaybe »

I run a few serverless stacks on AWS Lambda, have been for years and slept well all the time. Serverless is forgiving. Things heal and don't stay dead like it can happen with anything that carries state like a container.

That said, I do prefer the development model of containers. Run them anywhere. That said, has it's own limitations. For example, he claims to be able to run state within container. Doesn't make sense if you want to scale out. Persistence is a problem. You can't run DBs on ECS Fargate for example.

And the worst aspect of running containers is: in bigger orgs the standard will probably be K8s. And that has nothing to do any more with the simplicity of containers as mentioned in the article.

Re: Serverless Is a Scam

#20

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

huksley wrote: post #8

I really loved serverless for while, particularly in the early days, when building small projects. But AWS Lambdas, for example, is constant maintenance hell for larger applications, including building and dependency issues, debugging and slow deployment. One feat is still amazes me - my AWS Lambda React webapp example (Todo with server rendering) which were deployed in 2019, still works as today, and I have not chan…

Lambdas do require runtime updates. This means nothing happens for a relatively long time and then suddenly the lambda stops working. If you don't have many dependencies, upgrading the runtime is easy. But if one of dependencies requires an older runtime, it's better not to wait until the last moment.
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