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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

#181

Post by dang »

laumars wrote: post #150
dang wrote: 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?

The point of HN is that you can have a civil, substantive discussion.

I called it a spat because you both got personal. It's nice that you both enjoyed it, but it's still against the rules here. It sets a bad example for others, who unfortunately aren't so convivial.

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

#182

Post by laumars »

dang wrote: post #181
laumars wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The point of HN is that you can have a civil, substantive discussion. I called it a spat because you both got personal. It's nice that you both enjoyed it, but it's still against the rules here. It sets a bad example for others, who unfortunately aren't so convivial.

Condescending perhaps, but there was no personal attacks and certainly none any worse nor less substantive than your terse reply (which, it's worth mentioning, was also after the discussion had already reached its natural conclusion).

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

#183

Post by actionowl »

We've been using serverless with AWS lambdas for a few months.

Testing is hard, the more AWS shit you tie yourself to the harder local testing and development becomes. I picked up a lambda project another developer started and asked them how they were testing and developing locally. Answer: They deployed a new update for every change (!?)

Debugging: Look at log files...

Also, at some point serverless added some autocomplete crap to my .bashrc file without asking which I will never forgive them for.

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

#184

Post by laumars »

scarface74 wrote: post #167
Zelphyr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

This is exactly how we test our lambda code that call AWS media encoders

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

#185

Post by laumars »

Zelphyr wrote: post #110
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.

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 oth…

It's good practice to have separation of dev and prod service anyway. I don't see that as duplication, I see that as different operating environments.

Even back in the days of self hosting, I've lost track of the number of times a Dev script has gone wild and caused excessive load on the RDBMS or tried to spam the SMTP relay. On a Dev environment you can catch that without affecting live services.

As for the other issues you meantioned, this is nothing new. There have always been appliances in IT. Whether it is physical rack mountable appliances like hardware video encoders, or SaaS solutions on a public cloud like AWS media transcoders, you interact with then the same. The only difference with public cloud solutions is you you first have to bridge your office network with your AWS (or whatever) virtual private network. Thankfully you have a variety of tools at your disposal to do that. (Over the years I've used no less than 4 different methods to bridge a local network with an AWS VPC - each taking advantage of their own specific business requirements).

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

#187

Post by fauigerzigerk »

staticassertion wrote: post #148
squeaky-clean wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>But you already had to handle the case of "code blew up because of a bug".

I'm handling bugs very differently than network failures though, because network failures are usually temporary while bugs are usually (or even by definition) permanent.

Dealing with temporary outages in lots of places is extremely difficult. You may need retry logic. You may need temporary storage or queuing. You may need compensating transactions. You may need very carefully managed restarts to avoid DDOSing the service once it comes back online. There may be indirect, non-deterministic knock-on effects you can't even test for properly.

Microservices cause huge complexity that is very hard to justify in my opinion.

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

wnsire wrote: post #97
nostalgeek wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures because it's purely a marketing concern, it means nothing from an architectural standpoint, it"s a buzzword, like 'cloud', 'nosql', 'web 2.0' or 'the blockchain'.

> because it's purely a marketing concern, it means nothing from an architectural standpoint Serverless computing is an system architecture design that focus emphasis is abstracting the entirety of the infrastructure to let developers focus solely on code. Per say , with AWS Lamba + API Gateway + S3 developers can create Web Application that usually required EC2 Servers and web framework like Spring , Laravel etc...…

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

cphoover wrote: post #18
danharaj wrote: post #2

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

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…

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by zaarn »

rawrmaan wrote: post #142
yoran wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd also like to see the AWS bill once you hit infinite scale. AWS is already pretty expensive on their own...
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