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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

#21

Post by matte_black »

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…

Lack of connection pooling for database connections means serverless architecture will never be used for serious data heavy apps.

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

#23

Post by danharaj »

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…

> The reason "NoSQL" dbs got popular are because in my experience Monolithic large relational databases are hard to scale.

I've met a lot of people whomst thought they had to scale that big. Very few handled anything that couldn't run off a beefy postgres installation.

The purpose of a system is what it does. People don't use nosql to scale because they don't need to scale, so what does it do? People use nosql to not write schemas. That's what it's for, for the majority of users.

If I need a key value store, I use a key value store. There's no flashy paradigm there. If I need to put a container up on the interwebs, I do it. What's serverless? Nosql is an "idea", "paradigm", "revolution", or at least the branding of one. Just the same, serverless.

I will continue to ignore nosql and serverless.

The industry sure does change, but do you know how much of that is moving in a real direction and how much is a merry-go-round? Let's brand it "Carousel" and raise 10 million. And in 20 years we can talk about serverless being the new hotness, again.

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

#24

Post by na85 »

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 it's due to the fact that the terminology seems intentionally misleading at worst, and like a marketing buzzword at best.

Every technical person understands there's still a server there. So it seems like a marketing tactic intent on misleading clueless CEOs.

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

#25

Post by jchw »

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 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.

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

#26

Post by y4mi »

xchaotic wrote: post #15
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.

"a degree that the developer no longer has to think about anything but his application code." a developer still has to understand the implications of resource consumption etc. For performance-critical pieces of code, IMO it's better to have direct access to the hardware - I had a recent first hand experience with this debugging NUMA related performance issue.

nor would you use a dockerized microservice for that, or would you?

serverless is - as i said before - a dockerized microservice as its heart. It should only be used in in places where you'd do it without the abstraction.

There are a lot of services / applications you can build with this. For example Adapters for external SaaS which should be able to trigger certain actions, or just plain JSON APIs which query a DB and output their results...

but using it to join 2 TB of data and process it afterwards in realtime? yeah, thats not a valid usecase for serverless.

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

#27

Post by wahnfrieden »

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.

It’s still the early days so there are pain points, but Amazon already announced a solution to this: Serverless Aurora. It’ll be some time still until it’s public and Lambda-friendly though. And MySQL comes before Postgres.

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

#29

Post by ryanworl »

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.

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.

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

#30

Post by yoran »

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.

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 serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless "because it brings so many other issues". I think AWS has already started that with Amazon Aurora.

That aside, I agree that there are a lot of secondary concerns that are important when running things in production but that aren't available out-of-the-box when you run something on AWS Lambda. I'm thinking about error monitoring, performance monitoring, logging,... All those things need to be set up and that's quite time-consuming.

However, I think that's more due to serverless being relatively new and not as mature as the traditional way of doing. I don't think it will take long before we'll have the equivalent for serverless of adding `gem 'newrelic_rpm'` to your Gemfile and magically having performance and error monitoring across your app.

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