Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by cphoover » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:36 PM UTC

sbinthree wrote: post #14

toomuchtodo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is all of this tooling (Docker, Serverless, NoSQL) has been created to “support developer velocity”, which really just ends up as technical debt. You can’t magic away the need for experience and domain knowledge. Docker doesn’t replace the need to know how VMs work. Containers don’t magically allow you to scale to infinity (Although k8s shows a lot of potential). And you probably should be using P…

I am learning this lesson the hard way with dynamically typed languages on the server. If the documentation and database have to be statically typed, you should really use types in the code. So dynamically typed languages on the server is impossible (?).

No offense but BS. What you have claimed is totally unsubstantiated, and not aligned with my experience working on highly-trafficked eCommerce applications.

If you know what your doing you can write elegant, performance tuned, secure and maintainable code in a dynamic language. I've also seen poorly written code written in statically typed languages.

It really comes to who is writing the code, what kind of standards they abide to, and their architectural prowess.

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

#32

Post by brylie » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

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 may misunderstand your comment.

That said, where I work (MaaS Global) we have a production PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS Relational Database Service (RDS):

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/

We connect to the AWS RDS instance in our lambda functions using an ES library called knex.js and some environment variables to store the DB credentials:

https://knexjs.org/

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

#33

Post by dpeck » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:40 PM UTC

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.

That’s really what’s keeping me from developing stuff with it. I can get the job done with dynamodb but I’m really looking forward to building something with Postgres in a “serverless” context.

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

#34

Post by cphoover » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:41 PM UTC

danharaj wrote: post #23

cphoover wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Scale is not just user load, but also scale of application complexity. In my experience when one db connection has access to every resource, in a complex application, this can lead to some really convoluted queries and make schema changes very difficult because of cross cutting dependencies built into these queries, triggers, procedures... etc. This is forgetting about the issues of deadlocks when you have 80 consuming services and applications you don't even know about are opening up all sorts of transactions. Even just splitting the DB into schemas for each resource domain and limiting access per service can help to avoid this.

Also performance is relative, I've worked on highly trafficked applications that had to support high throughput. I have also worked on applications backed by relational storage where data size and complexity has impacted performance.

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

#35

Post by neom » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:43 PM UTC

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.

What prevents being prescriptive about how the abstractions are consumed or presented?

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

#36

Post by joecot » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:46 PM UTC

brylie wrote: post #32

rawrmaan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 may misunderstand your comment. That said, where I work (MaaS Global) we have a production PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS Relational Database Service (RDS): https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/ We connect to the AWS RDS instance in our lambda functions using an ES library called knex.js and some environment variables to store the DB credentials: https://knexjs.org/

How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC? Are you pre-warming your lambda functions? Did you open up your RDS instance to the world so you could connect to it from a public lambda network? I know you had to pull some magic, because I've been down that road.

It's been a problem for years and there's been no sign of a solution. Example article from last month: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/lambda-vpc-cold-starts-a-lat...

These are the sorts of problems that turn people off from using serverless architectures.

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

#37

Post by whistlerbrk » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:49 PM UTC

matte_black wrote: post #21

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.

not necessarily into this serverless thing but that doesn't seem like a valid complaint, use a global connection pooler like pgbouncer

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

#38

Post by manigandham » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:49 PM UTC

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…

Because it should really just be called Functions-as-a-service, and they are great for single-focus reactive/connective processing and 1-off tasks but are not a replacement for everything as people try to use it for.

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

#39

Post by sebringj » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:52 PM UTC

I ended up using lamda for several things ad hoc and I have to say the experience is great to quickly add functionality to specific niche things you don't necessarily want to run on your API servers because of weight or simply that having a trigger built in makes the whole flow simpler. However, the downside is if you do something stupid like create an infinite trigger accidentally your bill will exponentially increase. Always remember that part. On a $5 digital ocean instance, they will never charge you $3000 a month for accidentally doing something stupid but AWS will forgive you one time at least and I have my one time now. The most hilarious part of this whole thing...and this is really one of the main points, the $5 digital ocean kuejs (nodel.js) server instance that my AWS lamda was smashing the shit out of with millions of requests did not go down the entire time although had some intermittent slow downs of course. $5 goes a long way apparently.

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

#40

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 3:54 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #24

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.

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

Originally it was a marketing buzzowrd designed to make Amazon's FaaS offering seem like a bigger deal than it was, and somewhat misleading in that role because FaaS of the type it was applied to aren't any more serverless (even from the perspective of what the customer needs to manage) than common PaaS offerings.

OTOH, I kind of like the way Google seems to have adopted it as a blanket term for cloud services where the customer is not concerned with physical or virtual servers as such; it seems the term.is being wrestled into being descriptive and non-deceptive.

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

The non-existence of servers isn't what it communicates, only technical people who also lack any sense of what matters to business world think that. (It's also targeted more to CTOs/CIOs than CEOs).