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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

#161

Post by qudat »

ryanworl wrote: post #29
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.

You connect the same way as you do in a regular app. Which is to say, you open the database connection outside of the request handling method (for example, as a global) and then use it from within the request handling method. When your app wakes up again for another request, the database connection is still open and you just use it.

As far as I know this works but more as a hack not as a robust officially supported solution.

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

#162

Post by qudat »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #133
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 help run a Node server, and we have some jobs that aren't run through CRON, but instead are set up using in-memory intervals. So I'm considering using a serverless setup to offload the work. In your opinion, it easy to differentiate between dev/prod environments for development? How about logging?

Logging by default sucks for Lambdas. Because lambdas are not "servers" they do not have an external IP address, which means that if they want to communicate with the external world, you need to setup a NAT for it.

Differentiating dev/prod is not too bad, everything is labelled based on your naming scheme for serverless.

Having said that I think lambdas are a great use case for cron jobs.

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

#163

Post by rhlsthrm »

somebodythere wrote: post #73
tango12 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might not be that easy because only postgres can take a few hundreds of connections which won't work out if you have a few thousands of serverless functions? No persistent connection pools.

Well, just put the connection logic outside of the main handler so it's shared between invocations! Wait, oops, you have state now.

Realistically could you do this with Redis or something similar? Not sure about security implications of this though...

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

#164

Post by inopinatus »

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…

These are complaints about the immaturity of the implementations. About which I’m inclined to agree but still recognise that the architectural style has legs.

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

#165

Post by mmt »

chii wrote: post #11
y4mi wrote: 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.

> 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).

> isn't really that much work

I suspect that it's this little parenthetical tidbit, and implicit disagreement with it (or differing definitions of "much") that drives the creation of this kind of abstraction.

In some situations, I consider the gap to be legitimate, where it may be easy (not that much work) for an expert but difficult for everyone else, and, more importantly, becoming expert is non-trivial, even with training/mentorship from one.

In other situations, I consider the gap to be merely one of perception/misestimation, either because it would actually be relatively easy for a non-expert who had actually tried, and/or the needed expertise is shallow enough that it can be quickly taught.

I believe autoscaling is (or at least originally was) of the former category and that the availability of tools and abstractions around it has allowed a broad number of non-experts to leverage the wisdom of a much narrower group of expert practitioners.

OTOH, I believe running hardware in a datacenter (as opposed to outsourcing it to a VPS or even cloud) is of the latter category. I routinely read comments like "have to hire 5 sysadmins" from non-experts when we experts know that estimate is around 20x too high for a scale of hundreds of servers. Even at higher scale, if hiring is necessary, the hardware-specific skills are easily taught, so junior staff is fine.

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

#166

Post by jdo20bbx »

chii wrote: post #157
Zelphyr wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why its ideal or not always possible? Ideal because it's faster development time. And free since I'm not paying Amazon compute time to run my code while I write it. Not always possible because I don't have AWS's services locally. As mentioned elsewhere, there are emulators but, by virtue of their emulation, may not always perform like the real thing. That's a debugging ball of wax that I personally hate having to unt…

Can't these services be mocked out? Surely you are wrapping the service API with your own code to prevent vendor lock in right?

Doesn’t everyone just spinup and teardown either an EC2 based Docker host or and EKS worker as needed?

Especially for CRUD apps and otherwise simple apps, testing should start after git push.

Don’t want to wait each time? Automatic build and teardown of test envs on a schedule, to avoid always up.

I still local test low-level code. But anything running in a cloud should really just be tested there.

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

#167

Post by scarface74 »

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.

I can’t speak for ElasticTranscoder, but there is nothing stopping you from running your lambda function locally and still connect to all of the AWS services.

Just like people have been calling their controller actions from test harnesses for ages to test their APIs. You can call call your handler the same way.

At the end of the day, AWS is just passing you a JSON message. You can call your lambda function manually with the same JSON payload locally.

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

#168

Post by scarface74 »

Zelphyr wrote: post #151
eyjafjallajokul wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why?

Why its ideal or not always possible? Ideal because it's faster development time. And free since I'm not paying Amazon compute time to run my code while I write it. Not always possible because I don't have AWS's services locally. As mentioned elsewhere, there are emulators but, by virtue of their emulation, may not always perform like the real thing. That's a debugging ball of wax that I personally hate having to unt…

Which services are you using for which you are concerned about cost while you are developing?

You can access most (all?) of AWS services without running on AWS EC2/Lambda.

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

#169

Post by scarface74 »

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.

What do you mean, how do you connect? The same way you connect on prem. Using, the Postgres drivers. You can either have a publicly accessible Postgres instance with a DNS entry (not recommended) or you can run both the DB and the lambda inside of a VPC.

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

#170

Post by stcredzero »

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…

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.

So what if I gave you a command-line tool to simply make the current code in your development environment live?

Want a debugger? Nope.

And I also gave you live step debugging, plus replays of recent server state?

Want log files? Gotta get them from a different service that frequently has a lag of 30 seconds or more.

And the logs from the instance you're debugging are available instantly?

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