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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

#171
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is that a “hack”? You create your DB and you get a connection string to a publicly accessible database or you create it inside a VPC and you configure your lambda to run inside a subnet within your VPC and you configure your security group. This can all be configured within the console.

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

#172

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…

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…

I'm a big fan of serverless, but these are valid questions to which there really ought to be better answers than "nope".

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

#173

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 fully agree with you. Based on my experience, Lambda is perfect if you only want to perform some relatively standalone task (such as a compute intensive rendering). As soon as it needs to connect to 3rd party entities, it becomes very slow and loses some of its benefits. Connecting Lambda to an AWS DB for example is challenging to say the least. It also takes a couple tens milliseconds just to setup the DB socket a…

Connecting Lambda to an AWS DB for example is challenging to say the least.

Why does this keep getting repeated? You get a publicly accessible host and use the same drivers you use on prem or you put both the lambda and the database inside your VPC.

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

#174
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If you build a good enough abstraction, you can give developers a lot for free without needing them to understand. Current serverless platforms are wasteful, but the underlying concept is not inherently wasteful, and I think that cloud providers and serverless software platforms will improve over time.

The need to understand is a primary skill for a decent engineer. Was in the 1960‘s and still is today. Lack of Knowledge is what makes an engineer a business risk.

I don't need to understand metallurgy thanks to processors. I don't need to understand instruction set architectures or assembly language thanks to programming languages. When abstractions truly separate concerns, they make it very much possible to not understand, much to the benefit of the programmer, who now needs to keep significantly less in their head. Aren't you glad you don't have to be concerned with making sure your stack stays balanced thanks to scoping in C? Well, I'd like to write an API without having to be concerned about job scheduling, dispatching, logging, monitoring, etc. Understanding these things may make you a better programmer (or they may not,) but not having to understand let's you let go of things you don't need to care about and focus on what you're trying to accomplish instead.

We as programmers love writing solutions to problems that have been solved hundreds of times. How many node.js http frameworks exist? Or JS frameworks for that matter? But the thing is, for the most part, when it comes to API servers, there's a crazy amount of overlap between what they need to do. They handle HTTP requests and spit out a response. Someone has written this better than you can, so you use an HTTP library. You probably want to serve multiple endpoints on one port, so you route with the URL. What do you do, implement a radix tree, or use a mature, well-tested, high performance library? If you are sane, probably the latter.

All serverless is is a realization that most HTTP servers don't need anything special in terms of routing, scheduling, monitoring, etc. By turning an HTTP server inside out, you can allow the developer to focus on exactly one thing and give them a platform that is stable and inherently scalable by virtue of being stateless and making scheduling an implementation detail.

If you have a very efficient engine to execute functions, and a very robust and scalable HTTP server, and you can write your app logic to be stateless (locally, anyway,) there's no reason to believe that the serverless approach would be any technically worse than the old school approach.

I feel likewise similar about static files. I don't need to write and operate yet another static file server. I can use Amazon S3 + Cloudfront, or Firebase, or GCS, or any other solution. It doesn't mean I don't know how. It's an admission that I have no special requirements, and would like to focus on the things I'm writing that are particular to my app.

What's dangerous? Not serverless, for sure. What's dangerous, is programmers implementing everything from scratch because they can, doing their own operations when they don't have the resources to.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No server to manage is the least important part of it all. It should describe the abstraction that's actually being offered: IaaS is servers, PaaS is a single app, FaaS is individual function, SaaS is just software. Any of those other than IaaS itself can be "serverless".

> No server to manage is the least important part of it all. OK, well it's the most important part for me. I don't want to manage patching a box.

Sure, but there have always been options for that, regardless of abstraction level.

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

#176
post #172

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. 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…

I'm a big fan of serverless, but these are valid questions to which there really ought to be better answers than "nope".

I'm working on making all of those a "yup."

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

#178
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How is that a “hack”? You create your DB and you get a connection string to a publicly accessible database or you create it inside a VPC and you configure your lambda to run inside a subnet within your VPC and you configure your security group. This can all be configured within the console.

The main issue with this approach is that running your lambda in a VPC results in painfully slow cold starts, on AWS at least.

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

#179
post #8
post #2

Here's to hoping ignoring serverless will work as well as ignoring NoSQL worked for me.

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.

> You'll definitely be able to ignore it and it probably won't be used in smallish companies for ages.

Why do you say this? I feel like this would be very useful for smallish companies. I'm running eng for my 3 person startup and looking into using Lambda-based microservices with Serverless for our next project. My goal is to completely minimize devops time for our engineers, as well as reduce cost compared to PaaS services.

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

#180
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Likewise :-)
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