The Architecture of Serverless Data Systems

Post by rawgabbit » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 2:10 AM UTC

baka367 wrote: post #41

Dave3of5 wrote: post #16

A bit too waffling for me to read all but I would like to make a small comment. Why are more and more devs trying to use s3 as a general purpose DB? Working on a system right now where the architects have made this mistake it has insanely poor performance (High latency) and lack any proper ACID compliance. I've now been asked to "make it faster" and the answer is to switch back to an actual DBMS. > Top tier SaaS serv…

We went this way with our Synapse/Azure Data Lake solution, and it has been nothing but pain since. I'd estimate than in the past year more than 60% of the dev time was spent fighting random edge cases that this kind of approach brings. Sure, there is the benefit of being able to dump your cold data in cheaply and read flexibly, but... the dev ux is just PITA.

Post by _w1tm » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 11:06 AM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #11

fergie wrote: post #6

Two observations: - "serverless" is a really bad name for these systems. As is often commented, some variation of "somebody-elses-server" would be better. - Cost wasn't mentioned in the article, but the cost of renting databases and search-indices is still really high, even though these technologies are no longer the new hotness.

My opinion is that serverless means you don't have to deal with servers (physical or virtual). You deal with higher-level entities. You don't install Ubuntu, you just provision database from web UI or terraform script. Hardware, OS and some software is managed for you. This allows consumer to deal with less complexity and this allows provider to be more flexible with resource allocations.