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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

#141

Post by rawrmaan »

nodesocket wrote: post #129
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.

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

Okay, that's a great solution. I actually had no idea that was possible.

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

#142

Post by rawrmaan »

yoran wrote: post #30
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.

I think the example you give is more because there's a mismatch between technologies, rather than the "fault" of serverless. In serverless, your endpoints become infinitely scalable. This doesn't go well when they're backed by technologies where there is a hard limit on the number of connections, for instance SQL servers or a Redis server. I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverle…

It just seems to me like the "infinite scalability" promise of serverless is only realistic if you have no database. Because inevitably, you'll hit database scaling issues due to query patterns and suboptimal indexes LONG before you'll have a hard time scaling up your fleet of servers because you're getting too many requests.

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

#143

Post by i386 »

This looks interesting and I wish them good luck. The problem with any developer tools startup is that no matter how great the product is, the willingness to pay is very low (developers think they can replace you with a small script) and extremaly likely that your market gets slowly eaten from the bottom by open source and/or MS/Google/Amazon fold in your service into their cloud platform.

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

#144

Post by dang »

laumars wrote: post #137
gaius wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is in very poor taste. I believe my analogy to be a sound one, in that all wireless does is insulate the end user from mile upon mile of wiring, just as serverless insulated the user from racks upon racks of servers, and that you were - and are - being needlessly pedantic.

I don't think it's being pedantic if your analogy is based on a basic premise that is fundamentally untrue. I get there is no such thing as a perfect analogy but I'd at least expect the subject to be factually acuate even if the comparison is subjective.

Would both of you please stop this ridiculous spat.

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

#145

Post by jaflo »

Wooo! I'm happy for them! I am using their stuff right now for a project I'm working on (plug: https://kurz.app/) and I really appreciate the ecosystem serverless is cultivating. Simple stuff like bundling up pip requirements or syncing a local folder with a S3 bucket could be done using a script I write, but through serverless I can just install a package and have it hook in as part of each deploy.

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

#146

Post by brettlangdon »

jaflo wrote: post #145

Wooo! I'm happy for them! I am using their stuff right now for a project I'm working on (plug: https://kurz.app/ ) and I really appreciate the ecosystem serverless is cultivating. Simple stuff like bundling up pip requirements or syncing a local folder with a S3 bucket could be done using a script I write, but through serverless I can just install a package and have it hook in as part of each deploy.

Wow, this is a really cool application. I needed to cut down a song this week and this is a very cool approach.

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

#147

Post by jaflo »

brettlangdon wrote: post #146
jaflo wrote: post #145

Wooo! I'm happy for them! I am using their stuff right now for a project I'm working on (plug: https://kurz.app/ ) and I really appreciate the ecosystem serverless is cultivating. Simple stuff like bundling up pip requirements or syncing a local folder with a S3 bucket could be done using a script I write, but through serverless I can just install a package and have it hook in as part of each deploy.

Wow, this is a really cool application. I needed to cut down a song this week and this is a very cool approach.

Thank you! I really appreciate it. Can I ask what you cut the song down for? I think I'll make a ShowHN post soon and am still trying to figure out my market outside of video editors.

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

#148

Post by staticassertion »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #140
staticassertion wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand. Why would an RPC call a different function than what you expect? I'll grant you that there is more complexity in this approach, but I believe that fault tolerance is something you improve with microservices, not something you regress on.

It's not that it would call a different function, but that sometimes the RPC will fail to call the function. You can't get a network error calling a function which is in memory on the same process.

This is what I was saying though.

Yes, you have to handle the failure case of "network call". Microservices add this failure case. But you already had to handle the case of "code blew up because of a bug".

By forcing you to handle comm errors like network failure, you also force people, implicitly, to handle "code blew up because of a bug" errors. Even though it adds a second error case, you pretty much handle them the same way in the same place.

There was always an error case - the fact that code may blow up.

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

#149

Post by brettlangdon »

jaflo wrote: post #147
brettlangdon wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this is a really cool application. I needed to cut down a song this week and this is a very cool approach.

Thank you! I really appreciate it. Can I ask what you cut the song down for? I think I'll make a ShowHN post soon and am still trying to figure out my market outside of video editors.

Wedding first dance song. Original was 5+ minutes long, we need 2-3.

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

#150

Post by laumars »

dang wrote: post #144
laumars wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's being pedantic if your analogy is based on a basic premise that is fundamentally untrue. I get there is no such thing as a perfect analogy but I'd at least expect the subject to be factually acuate even if the comparison is subjective.

Would both of you please stop this ridiculous spat.

What spat? This is the first time I've chatted to the guy and I harbor no ill will towards him.

Isn't the point of HN that you can have a discussion when you disagree with someone?

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