Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Serverless: I'm a Big Kid Now

simplethread.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 71 posts

Re: Serverless: I'm a Big Kid Now

#21

Post by pier25 »

k__ wrote: post #12
pier25 wrote: post #10

> Serverless container services such as Heroku, Netlify, AWS ECS/EKS Fargate, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Azure Kubernetes Service IMO I don't think Heroku and others fit the serverless paradigm. To me serverless is about automatic scaling of performance and cost. With Heroku you need to provision capacity in advance, and you pay for it whether you use it or not. Heroku doesn't scale automatically either, you do th…

As far as I know Netlify is just a pretty wrapper around AWS services like Lambda, so I think, it should fit the serverless bill. But I don't know much about their pricing.

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear about which of those I meant.

Netlify does definitely fit the serverless paradigm.

Re: Serverless: I'm a Big Kid Now

#23

Post by _abox »

I absolutely like managing servers. It makes sure I am fully aware where my data is at what time, and what is handling it. in a European world with GDPR that became a lot more important. At the same time this has been a big factor in recent data leaks. Those leaks happened mainly because implementation issues, but those organisations didn't choose to make their data available in unsecured S3 buckets. It was able to happen because they didn't have enough visibility.

There's also many reasons given that don't really make sense.

> Your containers are cattle, not pets. If your container crashes, a new one is automatically fired up.

If my container crashes, I want to find out why so I can prevent it from happening again. One of the issues with these serverless technologies is that they make this kind of debugging harder. I don't want code to randomly crash and just getting restarted to be the solution. It means there is something wrong. To be fair he does mention this later on in the article.

> Serverless functions force you to write your code in a stateless way

So what. If I want to have my own server I can also do it stateless if that makes sense to me. Being forced in a direction is not a positive.

I think the scaling is very interesting. But this is not something that's required for many applications. It doesn't mean everything should be serverless. It just means there's a good option to choose from for usecases that can really benefit from it.

Pushing serverless for everything is like putting blockchain into everything because it's a buzzword right now.

Re: Serverless: I'm a Big Kid Now

#24

Post by [deleted] »

untog wrote: post #14
djhaskin987 wrote: post #8

> Nobody wants to manage servers. Managing servers is a nasty side effect of wanting to execute code. Actually, I am setting up a serverless app now. 4-5 lambdas, s3 buckets, RDS, IAM roles, and 6 weeks (easily) getting everything into CFT's and Ansible so that I can deploy this relatively small app. You know how I would replace all that stuff? 1 single VM. (Alright, maybe 2, 1 for the database.) A server buys you ea…

I don’t dispute that serverless deployments are a mess. But I look at it the other way: they make you deal with scaling up front, whether you need it or not. RDS, S3, all that... it scales to huge volumes. Your single VM will not. You can set up auto scaling with multiple VMs but by that point you’re going to be dealing with a lot of the issues you have with serverless deployments. Now, could a lot of serverless depl…

[deleted]

Re: Serverless: I'm a Big Kid Now

#25

Post by detaro »

jeffbee wrote: post #15

Serverless: so grown up that Google App Engine launched 12 years ago and hosts several huge, valuable services. The question of whether serverless is ready answered itself years ago. The remaining questions for prospective adopters are whether it meets your requirements, and are you mentally ready to adopt it (because cramming legacy concepts into serverless never works).

And in reverse, it can be surprisingly tricky to convince serverless advocates that it's not so new and GAE fits their definitions.

Re: Serverless: I'm a Big Kid Now

#26

Post by beilabs »

> I think I’m starting to develop a decent radar for which trends are going to have a lasting impact and which ones are going to fizzle out.

For those who want to get some fast insight to technology which is being adopted or dropped across industries in the software space then definitely check out Thoughtworks Technology Radar. It's regularly updated.

https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Re: Serverless: I'm a Big Kid Now

#27

Post by cnorthwood »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #8

> Nobody wants to manage servers. Managing servers is a nasty side effect of wanting to execute code. Actually, I am setting up a serverless app now. 4-5 lambdas, s3 buckets, RDS, IAM roles, and 6 weeks (easily) getting everything into CFT's and Ansible so that I can deploy this relatively small app. You know how I would replace all that stuff? 1 single VM. (Alright, maybe 2, 1 for the database.) A server buys you ea…

It's not just "1 single VM" though, as you'll have to configure the applications on top of that. Configuring/installing a Postgres instance on a VM, nginx for your load balancers, iptables for your firewall, user accounts, an application server (could be as simple as forever for a NodeJS app, or Gunicorn or something for Python, etc). And if you want to automate that (as it sounds like you do), you're still writing a bunch of Ansible and Terraform. I'm not sure that it is any easier or less time consuming, unless you already know one way and not the other, and have to bake in time to learn to one approach.

Re: Serverless: I'm a Big Kid Now

#29

Post by k__ »

sushshshsh wrote: post #28

Is it really that expensive to keep a server running 24/7 vis a vis the development complexity of lambdas? It depends on your work load. And your trust level in Amazon of course.

No it isn't expensive to keep a server running 24/7.

It's expensive to keep that server maintained.

Post reply on HN