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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

#41

Post by everdev »

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 the biggest knock against serverless is the same as microservices: your points of failure grow significantly.

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

#42

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> 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.

Just like now is to people who were programming in the 1990s, or the 1990s to people who were programming in the 1970s.

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

#43

Post by kauju »

joecot wrote: post #36
brylie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://mediu…

Your right that the cold start times are not ideal. But you get a huge free request load per month. Put an uptime pinger on it and keep it warm. Or do what I do and write your functions in golang. My average cold start time is around 4 seconds.

For the DB connection you put the lambda in the same vpc that the RDS exists in. Then you open the connection pool and reuse it if its active. Not that a new connection is a big overhead over leveraging an established socket.

Wonder where all this misinformation is coming from on lambda DB access issues.

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

#44

Post by rantanplan »

yoran wrote: post #30
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 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 serverle…

> I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless

Empty statement that means nothing. SQL/RDBMS is backed by computer science and robust engineering examples that make the world spin. Alternatives are usually full of fanfare and false promises.

> I think AWS has already started that with Amazon Aurora.

Just in time when we were talking about fanfare. Spend 10-20 minutes searching on the Internets to see what actual experiences people have with it.

Its 3X write increase? Bollocks. Usually the performance is worse than when you administer your own DB(Postgresql/MySQL). You might(or not) see some read-performance increase, which... well everyone can scale on reads so I don't see the point.

I suspect it has other goodies pertaining to administration/provisioning, but performance/scaling is not one of them.

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

#45

Post by k__ »

manigandham wrote: post #38
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.

As far as I know, serverless isn't just FaaS. As you pointed out FaaS is to connect things, nothing more.

For me serverless is pay-as-you go pricing, no over- or under-provisioning and last but not least, no server-management.

Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, AppSync, Device Farm, Aurora, etc. are all serverless.

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

#46

Post by eropple »

cphoover wrote: post #31
sbinthree wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you know what your doing you can write elegant, performance tuned, secure and maintainable code in a dynamic language.

You can! You totally can. But, statistically speaking? You probably won't. Neither will I. And that's why the minimal level of guardrails I'll put up with in 2018 is TypeScript and I'd really rather have better.

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

#47

Post by jssmith »

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 think this has been the case for the case for the past 20 years, probably longer, though I'm optimistic that improvement is possible. E.g., perhaps serverless computing is inefficient today but it could help improve hardware utilization.

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

#48

Post by patrickg_zill »

whistlerbrk wrote: post #37
matte_black wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does e.g. Amazon's offering have a way to do that? Or is there still a cold start time? Where do you run the pgbouncer that is always running?

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

#49

Post by nodesocket »

_Marak_ wrote: post #13

Congratulations to Austen and Serverless Inc. for raising an additional 10m dollars. From what I've seen they are all very nice people over at Serverless. I've been running a small service similar to their new "Serverless Platform" for some time and was approached by them in 2014 to see about joining their team. Ultimately I ended up deciding not to join because I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineerin…

> I wasn't convinced there was a strong enough engineering presence in theit leadership to make a good product

That seems like a strange requirement. Ultimately for a business to be successful there has to be people that know business, marketing, and slaes. If the leadership team is all hard-core tech engineers, there will be a lack of all of the other social and fundamental business skills needed.

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

#50

Post by mrlala »

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.

Who cares? It gets shit done.
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