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Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

unkey.com

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Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#21
post #6
post #2

Their problem isn't serverless, rather Cloudflare Workers and WebAssembly. All major cloud vendors have serveless solutions based on containers, with longer managed lifetimes between requests, and naturally the ability to use properly AOT compiled languages on the containers.

At that point, why should I use serverless at all? If I have to think about the lifetime of the servers running my serverless functions?

For a thing, which permanently has load it makes little sense.

It can make sense if you have very differing load, with few notable spikes or on an all in on managed services, where serverless things are event collectors from other services ("new file in object store" - trigger function to update some index)

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#22
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is still less management effort than taking full control of the whole infrastructure. Usually a decision factor between more serverless, or more DevOps salaries.

I would doubt that this is categorically true. Serverless inherently makes the whole architecture more complex with more moving parts in most cases compared to classical web applications.

Depends pretty much where those classical web applications are hosted, how big is the infrasture taking care of security, backups, scalability, failovers, and the amount of salaries being paid, including on-call bonus.

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#23
The takeaway here isn’t that serverless doesn’t work, it’s that the authors didn’t understand what they were building on. Putting a latency-critical API on a stateless edge runtime was a rookie mistake, and the pain they describe was entirely predictable.

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#24
post #2

Their problem isn't serverless, rather Cloudflare Workers and WebAssembly. All major cloud vendors have serveless solutions based on containers, with longer managed lifetimes between requests, and naturally the ability to use properly AOT compiled languages on the containers.

Cloudflare has containers now too, and having used AppRunner and Cloud Run, it's much easier to work with. Once they get rid of the container caps and add more flexibility in terms of container resources, I would never go back to the big cloud containers, the price and ease of use of Cloudflare's containers just destroy them.

I doubt that the bill would be that much cheaper, nonetheless thanks for making me aware they are a thing now.

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#25
post #11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, why should I use serverless at all? If I have to think about the lifetime of the servers running my serverless functions?

Because it is still less management effort than taking full control of the whole infrastructure. Usually a decision factor between more serverless, or more DevOps salaries.

There's a huge gap between serverless and full infra management. Also, IMO, serverless still requires engineers just to manage that. Your concerns shift, but then you need platform experts.

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#27
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is still less management effort than taking full control of the whole infrastructure. Usually a decision factor between more serverless, or more DevOps salaries.

There's a huge gap between serverless and full infra management. Also, IMO, serverless still requires engineers just to manage that. Your concerns shift, but then you need platform experts.

A smaller team, and from business point of view others take care of SLAs, which matters in cost center budgets.

Re: Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

#30
post #26

Linux servers running Go apps? Would be nice to see server cost and specs, backup strategy, etc.

Backup strategy? What do you mean by that?

Servers go down. What is the plan to get them "backup" and running ;)
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