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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

#121

Post by laumars »

Zelphyr wrote: post #117
laumars wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you that serverless is a step backwards if you want control about your running platform but your debugger example can be argued away by the fact that you shouldn't really be debugging a live platform. If your code is portable enough to run "serverless" then you should be able to spin up a docker container or whatever and run the same tests in there. I think the issue is some people see "serverle…

How do I debug locally/on Docker with services like SNS and ElasticTranscoder? I know there are emulators but those have gaps in services that providers like AWS offer. Not to mention, I'm debugging with an emulator and not the real thing.

You could run the docker container on an EC2 instance or have an SSH bastion / VPN tunnel between yourself and your AWS VPC.

I tend to opt for the SSH tunnel route for personal projects but use OpenVPN with a secrets management (eg Vault or AWS's new key store) for professional projects (ie when you have several people on your team).

AWS is versatile enough that you do actually have several options available to you.

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

#122

Post by dpeck »

kauju wrote: post #43
joecot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC? Are you pre-warming your lambda functions? Did you open up your RDS instance to the world so you could connect to it from a public lambda network? I know you had to pull some magic, because I've been down that road. It's been a problem for years and there's been no sign of a solution. Example article from last month: https://mediu…

Your right that the cold start times are not ideal. But you get a huge free request load per month. Put an uptime pinger on it and keep it warm. Or do what I do and write your functions in golang. My average cold start time is around 4 seconds. For the DB connection you put the lambda in the same vpc that the RDS exists in. Then you open the connection pool and reuse it if its active. Not that a new connection is a b…

Have any data on the variance on that 4 second average? That sounds very tolerable on its face.

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

#123

Post by mmt »

gaius wrote: post #113
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 don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures It’s the name. It infuriates people because obviously there still really are servers. But I think of it like WiFi - there still are wires, you just don’t see them.

I've read this analogy before, but it's weak enough to be inapplicable.

With wireless networking and even phones, the wires have actually been eliminated, replaced wholesale by something else, radio. A better analogy would be something like the powerline ethernet systems, but nobody is calling them something controversial like "wireless" or "cableless".

Put another way, I've seen cloud computing (of which "serverless" is, arguably, merely an evolution into increasing levels of abstraction) called "somebody else's servers". The equivalent with the Wifi analogy would be "somebody else's wires", and, usually, what wires there are, for the backhaul [1], aren't even somebody else's.

EDIT:

Ultimately, my point is this:

The analogy is weak becasue WiFi is not an abstraction layer on top of wired networking that merely hides the existence of (and, ideally, some of the downsides of dealing with) the wires, instead being a different technology with different upsides and downsides. Serverless is such an abstraction layer.

[1] Which brings up a nitpick: Wifi can remain even wireless in its entirety, with various mesh networking techniques.

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

#124

Post by pvg »

laumars wrote: post #118
gaius wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures It’s the name. It infuriates people because obviously there still really are servers. But I think of it like WiFi - there still are wires, you just don’t see them.

Except there literally isn't any wires in WiFi. Unless you're talking about power cables on access points or other unrelated tech used on devices that have ethernet / whatever AS WELL AS WiFi?

All-caps italics is an interesting choice. Is that both emphasized AND shouted?

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

#125

Post by [deleted] »

pvg wrote: post #124
laumars wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except there literally isn't any wires in WiFi. Unless you're talking about power cables on access points or other unrelated tech used on devices that have ethernet / whatever AS WELL AS WiFi?

All-caps italics is an interesting choice. Is that both emphasized AND shouted?

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by pbreit »

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 don't think it compares to the move to the cloud. The cloud was a lot easier to setup than dedicated and the end result was basically the same...you got a server. Serverless is quite a different paradigm and the benefits are less obvious.

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

#127

Post by gaius »

mmt wrote: post #123
gaius wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures It’s the name. It infuriates people because obviously there still really are servers. But I think of it like WiFi - there still are wires, you just don’t see them.

I've read this analogy before, but it's weak enough to be inapplicable. With wireless networking and even phones, the wires have actually been eliminated, replaced wholesale by something else, radio. A better analogy would be something like the powerline ethernet systems, but nobody is calling them something controversial like "wireless" or "cableless". Put another way, I've seen cloud computing (of which "serverless…

the wires have actually been eliminated

I guess you don’t understand WiFi then, it’s wireless between you and the basestation (say 10m) then all wired from there to the server (which might be thousands of miles). You just don’t see those wires - and the proof is you don’t even realise they exist

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

#128

Post by gaius »

laumars wrote: post #118
gaius wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures It’s the name. It infuriates people because obviously there still really are servers. But I think of it like WiFi - there still are wires, you just don’t see them.

Except there literally isn't any wires in WiFi. Unless you're talking about power cables on access points or other unrelated tech used on devices that have ethernet / whatever AS WELL AS WiFi?

Except there literally isn't any wires in WiFi.

You think WiFi connects your laptop directly to the server in the datacentre? Interesting.

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

#129

Post by nodesocket »

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.

With Google Cloud Functions (they got the name right), you can simply link with a Cloud SQL instance using a special local socket interface provided by Google Cloud[1]. Their documentation provides complete examples as well on how to use global connection pools for MySQL and PostgreSQL.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/sql

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

#130

Post by mmt »

jssmith wrote: post #47
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.

I think this has been the case for the case for the past 20 years, probably longer, though I'm optimistic that improvement is possible. E.g., perhaps serverless computing is inefficient today but it could help improve hardware utilization.

> perhaps serverless computing is inefficient today but it could help improve hardware utilization.

This was a big selling point of virtualization, originally. It was certainly true for environments that suffered from poor utilization due to, say, running one app per (often oversized and/or antiquated) physical servers, as I believe was common for enterprise IT shops.

Whether this improvement could have been achieved by other technical means (at least in non-Windows environments) is debatable. It's also unclear what percentage of total hardware utilization enterprise IT accounted for back then, and I suspect it was much higher than today.

For other environments, where virtualization would replace simple Unix time-sharing, it stands to reason that hardware utilization had to go up, if only moderately.

Interestingly, enterprise IT practices are still so extremely expensive today that moving to a cloud provider is obviously cheaper for them.

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