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

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

#101

Post by matchagaucho »

Zelphyr wrote: post #100
paulgb wrote: 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…

It feels like a giant step backward from a development standpoint. It's as bad or worse than the days when I had to make a change, save it, FTP that file to the server, refresh, lather-rinse-repeat. Want a debugger? Nope. Want log files? Gotta get them from a different service that frequently has a lag of 30 seconds or more[1]. Don't get me started on the massive vendor lock-in inherent with a Serverless Architecture…

Serverless architecture certainly benefits from a localhost-first environment with mock data and unit test feedback prior to deployment.

But then... any architecture benefits from localhost-first.

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

#102

Post by jjeaff »

matchagaucho wrote: post #101
Zelphyr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like a giant step backward from a development standpoint. It's as bad or worse than the days when I had to make a change, save it, FTP that file to the server, refresh, lather-rinse-repeat. Want a debugger? Nope. Want log files? Gotta get them from a different service that frequently has a lag of 30 seconds or more[1]. Don't get me started on the massive vendor lock-in inherent with a Serverless Architecture…

Serverless architecture certainly benefits from a localhost-first environment with mock data and unit test feedback prior to deployment. But then... any architecture benefits from localhost-first.

Localhost first is ideal. But not always possible.

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

#103

Post by dhdersch »

rawrmaan wrote: post #20
paulgb wrote: 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.

Umm, for AWS, you place the Lambda function into a VPC and open a db connection the same way you would from another server?

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

#104

Post by Zelphyr »

danharaj wrote: post #23
cphoover wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

> The reason "NoSQL" dbs got popular are because in my experience Monolithic large relational databases are hard to scale. I've met a lot of people whomst thought they had to scale that big. Very few handled anything that couldn't run off a beefy postgres installation. The purpose of a system is what it does. People don't use nosql to scale because they don't need to scale, so what does it do? People use nosql to not…

Very much this. Sooooo many times I hear the cry of "does it scale?" To which I reply, "Does it need to?!"

At my last company we had a developer question scalability constantly despite the fact that the average customer of an instance of our product had about 200 users.

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

#105

Post by ryanmarsh »

pmlnr wrote: post #22

The coming age of people with no understanding of what running code actually means, no idea how hardware/close to hardware systems behave deep down, is going to be fabulous, and full of wasted computing.

The coming age? I do software development coaching and most every developer I'm contracted to teach doesn't understand what running code actually means (to use your phrase).

To take it another step, pretty much none of them understand how the JVM or V8 run their code.

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

#106

Post by eyjafjallajokul »

jjeaff wrote: post #102
matchagaucho wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serverless architecture certainly benefits from a localhost-first environment with mock data and unit test feedback prior to deployment. But then... any architecture benefits from localhost-first.

Localhost first is ideal. But not always possible.

Can you explain why?

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

#107

Post by matte_black »

whistlerbrk wrote: post #37
matte_black wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of connection pooling for database connections means serverless architecture will never be used for serious data heavy apps.

not necessarily into this serverless thing but that doesn't seem like a valid complaint, use a global connection pooler like pgbouncer

Try it.

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

#108

Post by SahAssar »

staticassertion wrote: post #85
everdev wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest knock against serverless is the same as microservices: your points of failure grow significantly.

I don't see how. Your points of failure were always there, but at most they're more explicit since "service failure" conflates with "network failure" - something I think is beneficial, since you always had to handle "service failures" but they were implicit. That is - a piece of code in a monolith may fail, and a piece of code in a microservice may fail, but I've already written the code to handle network errors for…

That assumes that a local function call has the same failure rate as a remote function call to a microservice, which in my experience is very much not true.

If I have a local function in the same language I can pretty much assume that a call to that function will actually call that function. With a remote call over HTTP or whatever I can't, so that is an additional failure I need to handle.

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

#109

Post by spullara »

dhdersch wrote: post #103
rawrmaan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Umm, for AWS, you place the Lambda function into a VPC and open a db connection the same way you would from another server?

I think what they are referring to is that Postgres and most other databases were built in the before time, the long long ago when every connection was a process and you limited concurrency of connections in the configuration file. If you have a 1000 concurrent calls on lambda you aren't going to be able to have them all talking to the same database at the same time. You'll run out of connections and the application will crash. Same reason you see this happen to PHP web applications when HN or Slashdot is pointed at them and they say they can't connect to the database. They have hit the concurrency limit. Connection pooling solves this problem but currently requires another layer between the application and the database.

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

#110

Post by Zelphyr »

matchagaucho wrote: post #101
Zelphyr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like a giant step backward from a development standpoint. It's as bad or worse than the days when I had to make a change, save it, FTP that file to the server, refresh, lather-rinse-repeat. Want a debugger? Nope. Want log files? Gotta get them from a different service that frequently has a lag of 30 seconds or more[1]. Don't get me started on the massive vendor lock-in inherent with a Serverless Architecture…

Serverless architecture certainly benefits from a localhost-first environment with mock data and unit test feedback prior to deployment. But then... any architecture benefits from localhost-first.

We found that the further we got into using different services the more difficult local development became. I just assumed that, as in the old days of web development, we would be forced into not being able to do local development at all. So then we'd have to have duplication of services. One for development and one for production. Or multiples for development so that each developer didn't step on the toes of the other. There goes the cost savings touted by Serverless Architecture.

These are problems that will be solved eventually, I have no doubt. But they haven't been solved yet and that is what makes Serverless Architecture not ready for prime time in my opinion.

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