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The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

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Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#501

Post by jdsalaro »

hermanradtke wrote: post #65
nickjj wrote: post #25

Kind of surprised the article didn't mention lack of reasonable development environment. At least on AWS, the "SAM" experience has been probably the worst development experience I've ever had in ~20 years of web development. It's so slow (iteration speed) and you need to jump through a billion hoops of complexity all over the place. Even dealing with something as simple as loading environment variables for both local…

GCP has https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/functions-framework but I will not use it. I have found the best solution is to abstract away the serverless interface and create a test harness that can test the business logic. This adds some extra complexity in the code, but iterations are fast and do not rely on the overly complex and bug prone "platforms" like SAM and Functions Framework.

Can you elaborate on your approach to "abstract away the serverless interface and create a test harness that can test the business logic"?

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#502

Post by baq »

we've done serverless in the dark ages of web programming back when perl was the fashionable hacker language and a buzzword. it was called 'cgi scripts'. it's amazing how a simple rebranding can do to a technology.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#503

Post by Just1689 »

nicbou wrote: post #487
randomsearch wrote: post #406

This advantage: “Serverless models don’t require users to maintain their own operating systems, or even to build applications that are compatible with particular OSs. Instead, developers can produce generic code, and then upload it to the serverless framework, and watch it run.” ... is utterly compelling and is why serverless will not just win, but leave renting a server a tiny niche market that few developers will h…

I don't do any server admin. My code runs in docker on pretty much any server I can get my hands on. Some of my code runs on a ThinkPad stashed behind my desk, on DigitalOcean, on my Macbook. I could deploy to a Raspberry Pi and it would run just the same. It takes 10 minutes to deploy an exact copy to a new environment. None of that requires OS maintenance. My house plants require far more maintenance than my softwa…

You probably know this but from what I read above it might be worth mentioning.

Your hosts are still packed with a bunch libraries and services (sshd for example) that should probably be updated with regularity.

I echo a lot of what you say here regarding run anywhere and not marrying some giant vendor.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#504

Post by beagle3 »

nicbou wrote: post #478

I don't buy into serverless. I went to a webdev convention, and it ended up being a serverless hype train. Industry experts with a financial incentive to promote serverless went on stage and told me they can't debug their code, or run it on their machine. They showed me comically large system diagrams for very simple use cases, then spent an hour explaining how to do not-quite-ACID transactions. Oh yeah and you can o…

It reminds me of https://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01... - you pay an extremely high cost upfront without even noticing - for the promise that at some point, you'll be able to scale out to any scale, with no extra human effort and for costs proportional to the scale.

I have not observed enough uses of serverless I can draw conclusions from, but if it's anywhere like hadoop style scaling, 95% of the users will pay 10x-100x on every metric without ever actually deriving any benefit compared to a non-distributed reasonably defined system, and 5% will actually benefit -- but everyone would want to put it on their resume and buzzword-bingo cards.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#505

Post by philliphaydon »

nickjj wrote: post #25

Kind of surprised the article didn't mention lack of reasonable development environment. At least on AWS, the "SAM" experience has been probably the worst development experience I've ever had in ~20 years of web development. It's so slow (iteration speed) and you need to jump through a billion hoops of complexity all over the place. Even dealing with something as simple as loading environment variables for both local…

My experience is with .NET Core and the development experience is awesome... Dropped a $250/m cost down to ~$9/m moving it from ec2 to lambda's. Environment variables are loaded no differently between development and prod. Nothing is all over the place as it's almost 0 difference between building a service to run in Linux/Windows vs a Lambda.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#506

Post by kall »

zelly wrote: post #448
randomsearch wrote: post #406

This advantage: “Serverless models don’t require users to maintain their own operating systems, or even to build applications that are compatible with particular OSs. Instead, developers can produce generic code, and then upload it to the serverless framework, and watch it run.” ... is utterly compelling and is why serverless will not just win, but leave renting a server a tiny niche market that few developers will h…

It's not nuts to run servers. If an application is operating at any scale such that there is a nonstop stream of requests, then it will be cheaper, faster, and more energy-efficient to run a hot server. This follows from thermodynamics. No matter how good the cloud vendor's serverless is, it's always going to be less efficient than a server, unless it doesn't do any setup and teardown (i.e. no longer server less ). I…

I agree with the suggestion when to use a server, but I think making it out to be an obvious physical law is a bit too far. Serveless runtimes can be massively multi-tenant, and in cases like Cloudflare have very little overhead per tenant, so they can share excess capacity for spikes, which you have to factor into your server. This gives them the ability to beat the server in thermodynamics. Maybe they will, maybe they won't but I don't think that's the argument that matters.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#507

Post by beagle3 »

Just1689 wrote: post #503
nicbou wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do any server admin. My code runs in docker on pretty much any server I can get my hands on. Some of my code runs on a ThinkPad stashed behind my desk, on DigitalOcean, on my Macbook. I could deploy to a Raspberry Pi and it would run just the same. It takes 10 minutes to deploy an exact copy to a new environment. None of that requires OS maintenance. My house plants require far more maintenance than my softwa…

You probably know this but from what I read above it might be worth mentioning. Your hosts are still packed with a bunch libraries and services (sshd for example) that should probably be updated with regularity. I echo a lot of what you say here regarding run anywhere and not marrying some giant vendor.

Agreed.

On hosts I manage professionally, I update/upgrade weekly after reading the notes - it takes a few minutes, I know I'm up to date and if there is anything I should be wary of.

On a personal debian server, I have an update/dist-upgrade -y nightly on a cron job, and I reboot if I read on HN/slashdot/reddit/lwn about an important kernel fix; Never had an issue, and I suspect it's about as secure and trouble free as whatever is underlying lambda -- with the exception that every 3-4 years I have to do an OS upgrade.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#508

Post by nicexe »

I'm working with a different type of serverless approach.

For a few hackathons now my team tries to push a client-side frontend + smart-contracts on a blockchain as a backend solution. This has a UX hit (some downsides of it could be mitigated though) but it made our business logic easier to implement. Depending on the project it has additional benefits to go with this stack. This cannot be applied to every project though and usually the UX hit or the lack of private transactions is enough to favor more traditional stacks.

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#509

Post by nebulous1 »

sippingjippers wrote: post #471
randomsearch wrote: post #406

This advantage: “Serverless models don’t require users to maintain their own operating systems, or even to build applications that are compatible with particular OSs. Instead, developers can produce generic code, and then upload it to the serverless framework, and watch it run.” ... is utterly compelling and is why serverless will not just win, but leave renting a server a tiny niche market that few developers will h…

It's not clear to me how much experience with serverless architectures the author of the parent comment has, but speaking as someone with plenty, the operational costs of serverless are at least equal to managing stateful infrastructure, with much less control when things go wrong. Lambda was a major step up in long term predictability compared to for example App Engine, where there have been plenty of instances of o…

> try rebooting the instances

I haven't done anything with serverless, but surely the class of problems that would be fixed by an instance restart don't happen in the first place on serverless

Re: The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled

#510

Post by synthc »

mattmanser wrote: post #58
synthc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, everything can be done serverless with a bunch of workarounds, that's one of the reasons it stalled IMO. Serverless makes somethings easier and other things harder, so it's advantages over good old fashioned servers are clear cut.

Did you mean aren't clear cut? Autocorrect?

Yes, i meant "aren't". Damn you autocorrect!
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