41–50 of 137 posts
Because serverless doesn't exist. Serverless just means it runs on someone else's servers, just like the cloud. And 10 years down the road people have forgotten how to run basic things, but Bezos buys Panama.
They aren't your servers and the server processes running your code are only active temporarily, usually with auto-scaling features.
I still find the DevEx of serverless terrible compared to the well-established monolith frameworks available to us. The YAML config, IAM permissions, generating requests and responses, it's all so painful to get anything done. Admittedly I speak as a software engineer primarily building CRUD apps, where frameworks have had decades of development. I can see use cases for event-driven applications where serverless may…
But that means you're not starting with serverless, and it's your pivot from the original monolith.
Because most applications have 27 active users per day and a $10/month VPS can handle 100000.
If it were 5% worse performance for 7% more cost, most people would probably not bat an eye.
When it can be 50% less performant for 200% more cost, eventually someone is going to say: sure there's overhead to owning that but I will be at a major competitive advantage if I can do it even just OK. And it turns out for most businesses doing it at the scale they need isn't all that difficult to get right.
The optimistic tone at the start of the article might just be a hallucinatory strawman set up. But as a probably old dog, I fail to see the allure of these technologies(*). When I read the copy trying to peddle them, to me it sounds quite like someone saying "Heey.. PSST! Wanna borrow 5000$ in cash, I can give it to you right now! Don't worry about 'interest rates', we'll get back to that LATER". When I build stuff o…
My current employer standardized on serverless and for many things it works well enough, but from my standpoint it's just more expensive.
This misses the main factor, I think: Vendor lock-in. There is no unification of APIs - every provider has their own bespoke abstractions typically requiring heavy integration into further vendor-specific services - moreso if you are to leverage USPs. Testing and reproducing locally is usually a pipe-dream (or take significantly more effort than the production deploy). Migrating to a different cloud usually requires…
How about cost at scale? Amazon itself shifted Prime Video from serverless to mostly containers and it resulted in huge savings.
From what I recall about that situation, they had a really stupid architecture that was using S3 as intermediate storage and processing video multiple times on multiple stages. In fact, the solution still used serverless afaik: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcMm0aaqnnI (take that u/UltraSane! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42506205 ) It likely could have been solved by serverless too, by using local storage a…