Serverless, Inc. lands $10M Series A to build serverless dev platform • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by justincormack » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

rantanplan wrote: post #44

yoran wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not being able to handle more than a few connections without connection pooling is nothing to do the using SQL. It is just a different bit of optimization that is needed to support fast transient connections without pooling.

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

#82

Post by GordonS » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

all_blue_chucks wrote: post #68

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.

> How, for example, do you connect to a Postgres database from Lambda/Cloud Functions? Exactly the same way you would with an EC2 instance...

How do you handle database connection pooling?

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

#83

Post by moduspol » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

everdev wrote: post #41

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.

The points of failure you are responsible for maintaining decrease significantly, though.

And the ones you aren't responsible for are ones that the rest of the world uses every day at 1000x the scale you do.

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

#84

Post by staticassertion » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

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.

Why shouldn't it be called serverless?

As a consumer, I essentially get to treat it as such - there is no server I need to manage.

In AWS-land this is a big differentiator over a system I have to manage, such as EC2, that just executes containers (meeting FAAS). Now I have FAAS and I don’t have to manage the infra, which is huge because AWS will be far better at meeting a patching SLA than I will be.

Yes, obviously there is a “server”, but I don’t have to think about it.

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

#85

Post by staticassertion » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

everdev wrote: post #41

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.

I don't see how. Your points of failure were always there, but at most they're more explicit since "service failure" conflates with "network failure" - something I think is beneficial, since you always had to handle "service failures" but they were implicit.

That is - a piece of code in a monolith may fail, and a piece of code in a microservice may fail, but I've already written the code to handle network errors for the microservice case, which means I've also implicitly handled the "bug in code" case.

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

#86

Post by ac360 » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 6:11 PM UTC

rawrmaan wrote: post #20

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 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.

imo, the most interesting data point is how in demand serverless architectures are WITH these issues. Imagine how compelling serverless will be once these issues are solved.

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

#87

Post by gsibble » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

SSilver2k2 wrote: post #53

Serverless is great, but I am really loving Zappa for Python Flask and Django development with Lambda and API Gateway. Deployed our first production tool with it and it's been working great.

Love Zappa.

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

#88

Post by ironjunkie » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

rawrmaan wrote: post #20

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 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 fully agree with you. Based on my experience, Lambda is perfect if you only want to perform some relatively standalone task (such as a compute intensive rendering). As soon as it needs to connect to 3rd party entities, it becomes very slow and loses some of its benefits. Connecting Lambda to an AWS DB for example is challenging to say the least. It also takes a couple tens milliseconds just to setup the DB socket and connection, that on a normal server can simply remain open and wait for the next request.

Serverless is nice, but the ecosystem of serverless tool is really missing today IMO

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

#89

Post by lowercased » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #74

chx wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serverless is a buzzword for a distributed system you can't SSH into.

I can't tell if that's meant to be a pejorative, but a distributed system I can't (and don't need to) SSH into makes my life easier :)

can't and not needing to are two really different things. the 'not needing to' just being shifted to having to use proprietary environments for doing stuff essential to debugging (like looking at log files) is, for most people, not a net win.

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

#90

Post by nostalgeek » Mon, Jul 30, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

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 don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures

because it's purely a marketing concern, it means nothing from an architectural standpoint, it"s a buzzword, like 'cloud', 'nosql', 'web 2.0' or 'the blockchain'.