Serverless: slower and more expensive

Post by holler » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

1337shadow wrote: post #675

abiro wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about serverless as framework-as-a-service. It has a learning curve, but if you buy in, it is an amazing productivity boost. (If Reddit’s video hosting being built and operated on a serverless stack by a single a engineer won’t convince you, I don’t know what will.)

In 2010 I was 24 yr old and built a myspace clone SaaS with music and video hosting with everything it implies: large uploads, background jobs, compiling an nginx patch to support range requests, ajax to have videos and music playing while browser, with Django on a 20 bucks/month server. If you're not convinced I don't know what will.

Post by daotoad » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #684

karlmdavis wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again.. we are running in circles, and this industry will never learn, because most “senior” people haven’t been around long enough. And that likely won't change in our lifetime, given the rate of growth in demand for software: we literally can't create senior engineers fast enough for there to be enough to go around. As an aside, I have the privilege of working with a couple of senior folks right now in my current…

The percentage of seasoned engineers is so low that 'senior' as a title often seems to stretch to "whoever is most experienced around here". That's probably fine, since people understand that experience is not reducible to that title. But this does bring to mind a metric for finding "objectively" senior engineers: What's the biggest idea you've seen abandoned and then reinvented with a new name?

Post by foxtr0t » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

weberc2 wrote: post #683

foxtr0t wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parallelism argument doesn’t pass muster because you can do the same thing with a cluster of free tier t2.micro machines with any good orchestration platform, not just lambda. This argument is basically: no counterpoint to the original post, but you can do things that are also easy on any other comparable platform. Tell me again what I don’t understand?

> Tell me again what I don’t understand? As someone who has done both, it's far, far easier to stand up a lambda than it is to manage a cluster of servers.

Post by drieddust » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

akoumis wrote: post #681

drieddust wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but running multiple lambda jobs in parallel would still add upto more time than 12 minutes. What am I missing?

If I was running 10,000 transfer jobs in parallel and the longest of them took 12 minutes, the job would take 12 minutes

Post by aflag » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

frenchman99 wrote: post #289

abiro wrote: post #50

PSA: porting an existing application one-to-one to serverless almost never goes as expected. Couple of points that stand out from the article: 1. Don’t use .NET, it has terrible startup time. Lambda is all about zero-cost horizontal scaling, but that doesn’t work if your runtime takes 100 ms+ to initialize. The only valid options for performance sensitive functions are JS, Python and Go. 2. Use managed services whene…

I can't support point 7. enough. People often forget about the cost of labor. We migrated our company webapp to Heroku last year. We pay about 8 times what a dedicated server would cost, even though a dedicated server would do the job just fine. And often times, people tell me "Heroku is so expensive, why don't you do it yourself? Why pay twice the price of AWS for a VM?" But the Heroku servers are auto-patched, I ge…