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Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

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Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#21
The phrase “serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. It simply means that developers no longer have to think that much about them. Computing resources get used as services without having to manage around physical capacities or limits.

Every application has to deal with capacities and limits. If they didn't, they'd break.

Say your app just stores a couple hundred megabytes every second, because you imagine there's no such thing as a storage limit. Let's imagine disk storage could be expanded fast enough to support this and costs zero money. We still live in a universe bound by physics, and storage only goes so fast: you will eventually have too much data to process.

We can't assume CPU or RAM capacity is limitless. If your app is cracking crypto passwords, depending on the password and method, all of AWS's collective compute cycles still might not be enough to crack one password in a reasonable amount of time. Ask the people trying to make flight price comparison engines about resource starvation.

It's not even difficult to learn how servers work and affect your application. There's really no point to this crap.

Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#22
In other words: PaaS or SaaS will become much more popular to build on, and developers will spend less time working with servers or IaaS. Industry trends continue. We need an article for this?

From a practical perspective, part of what this means is that even more seemingly-distinct services will depend on the same infrastructure. We're seeing this already, as every time AWS experiences downtime, a bunch of web services go down. It will be interesting to see what effects this has on everyday business, as outsourcing internal infrastructure (email, calendaring, file storage, etc) becomes even more popular.

Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#23
This is just a pendulum that swings back and forth, with 'serverless' as a new buzzword.

Everything was on the server (mainframe) with dumb terminals, where the mainframe was essentially the cloud, then we went to fat-terminals with the pc-era. The web came along and everything went back to the server, then smartphones and tablets, and we went back to apps with data stored on the server. Now we're going back again.

Where is this all going?

Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#24
This article has the right title and discusses the idea of services, not servers, but misses an even bigger opportunity to discuss how you can legitimately ditch lots and lots of servers. WebRTC means that every application can have aspects of peering and reduce the need for centralization in servers.

Back in 2010, well before WebRTC, I posted the following use case on the WHAT-WG mailing list that explores using peering to offset CDN static asset serving costs in social games. It was a while ago when I was a product manager and a lot less technical, so excuse some of the naive misconceptions I may have made at the time. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/20...

Anyone interested in exploring an idea like iron.io, but in their own application stack should check out the following projects from James Halliday (substack)

https://github.com/substack/seaport

https://github.com/substack/airport

https://github.com/substack/fleet

https://github.com/substack/airport-cluster-example

It'd be awesome to see someone combine WebRTC with the basic idea behind Seaports to allow semantic versioning of services provided by your application's users.

Re: Why The Future Of Software And Apps Is Serverless

#25

Ok, so 20 years ago, we all had to rely on lowly, pathetic servers. But now , thanks to THE CLOUUUUDD (read: hourly pricing on servers) there is a nebulous sludge of buzzwords running your applications, instead. Seriously, come on. People still have to think about their servers. AWS is nice, yes, but it still uses servers , and developers and ops people still need to think about those servers . It not like I press th…

If you're using App Engine, the number of frontend servers ("instances") is a config parameter. The fact that your app runs on multiple servers is implicit in API's and runtime environment because they don't allow you to do some things. But you don't know the names of the machines running your app, you don't get any server-side shell, and don't have any unix commands to run (except on your workstation if you use unix). Instead you upload your app and set the version that's live.

I completely agree that "serverless" is an annoying buzzword and I hope it doesn't catch on, but there's a difference between this sort of environment and managing a collection of virtual machines yourself (I've done both).

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