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Why aren't we all serverless yet?

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Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#81

Post by franktankbank »

deivid wrote: post #44

IMO, the dev workflow is significantly worse, integration testing is harder and I don't see the value on "scale to zero", when the alternative is a $5/mo VPS.

Agree with you but you're paying for the potential of a sudden burst in traffic planned or unplanned. Going to maintain 5000 servers when you may only use them for some intense period a few hours of a single day during a month. Thats the canonical serverless pitch. I'd hate to develop a new pipeline using serverless as my dev environment.

Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#82

Post by wink »

There's a huge grey area of "I want the response of a warmed up lambda" and "I don't have enough hits that it is actually warmed up" - pair with using certain language "runtimes" like the JVM and there you have it.

Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#83

Post by pjc50 »

nilamo wrote: post #62
tomnicholas1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In python there is lithops, which provides nice Executor primitives that can run on a wide range of cloud services (AWS lambda, GCF etc.) https://github.com/lithops-cloud/lithops

Omg the Python code examples are center aligned. But it looks sweet

That's extremely funny in the one language that cares about alignment.

(& the argument that I keep using against significant whitespace, which is that all sorts of other tools assume it can mess around with it with no downsides)

Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#84

Post by 9rx »

_heimdall wrote: post #26
sitkack wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a link and a breakdown that makes no sense. We switched from blue to square and saw a honey suckle savings. Amazon runs both and serverless is a billing model. Many serverless runtimes consume containers. Serverless, like microservices are a design philosophy.

Serverless is more of a billing philosophy than a design philosophy in my opinion. Serverless is all about outsourcing the infrastructure for scaling a micro service. How you design the service itself, or the system its a part of, can vary widely. There are definitely dedign constraints of going serverless, but I'd argue those are largely just the constraints of going with microservices rather than a monolith.

> Serverless is all about outsourcing the infrastructure for scaling a micro service.

Technically, it is all about removing the server from your application. The name literally tells you so. It is true that removing the server can offer some benefits in the scaling realm. In particular, it allows you to scale to 0 now that you no longer have to keep the process alive to serve requests.

Of course, that is not tradeoff free. Scaling to 0 brings you right back to the old problem of slow initialization once a request does come in, which was the primary driver for why we moved to hosting the server in the application in the first place.

Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#85

Post by qaq »

dijit wrote: post #63
qaq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same amount of compute Lambda is priced far higher than Fargate which itself is priced higher than ec2. People run large workloads on k8s with base workload compute fully covered by dedicated ec2 instances not because it's fun, but because it saves you a lot of $.

Totally agree. But it's the python argument. Python is super slow, inefficient and let's say that the build environment is not so nice. However, it's so easy to write functioning software in python that the alternative sometimes is not more efficient code, it's no code. Lambda, in theory, follows a similar paradigm, if you can click a button and have a service that scales to zero (with logging and monitoring) then yo…

If you under the impression that CI/CD and observability is easy with lambda I have a bridge to sell you. I worked on a large scale pure serverless project we wrote more CDK code than application code.

Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#86

Post by ElevenLathe »

Olreich wrote: post #54

This article misses the most important reason to not use Serverless: Cost. It's way more expensive to run serverless than it is to run any other format, even something like AWS Fargate is better than Lambda if you keep your Lambda running for 5% of the time. The second one is even more important though: Time. How many of my systems are guaranteed to stop after 15 minutes or less? Web Servers wouldn't like that, anyth…

This is why I use serverless (API Gateway + Lambda) for super low traffic stuff. If I have a cron that runs 24 times a day for 12 seconds, or a service that occasionally gets a request every few days, it makes sense not to deal with the overheard and waste of a server or container running constantly.

Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#87

Post by dijit »

qaq wrote: post #85
dijit wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. But it's the python argument. Python is super slow, inefficient and let's say that the build environment is not so nice. However, it's so easy to write functioning software in python that the alternative sometimes is not more efficient code, it's no code. Lambda, in theory, follows a similar paradigm, if you can click a button and have a service that scales to zero (with logging and monitoring) then yo…

If you under the impression that CI/CD and observability is easy with lambda I have a bridge to sell you. I worked on a large scale pure serverless project we wrote more CDK code than application code.

That’s sad, I saw a one click deploy button in my IDE and made an assumption.

What’s the point then if its not easier?

Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#88

Post by qaq »

9rx wrote: post #84
_heimdall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serverless is more of a billing philosophy than a design philosophy in my opinion. Serverless is all about outsourcing the infrastructure for scaling a micro service. How you design the service itself, or the system its a part of, can vary widely. There are definitely dedign constraints of going serverless, but I'd argue those are largely just the constraints of going with microservices rather than a monolith.

> Serverless is all about outsourcing the infrastructure for scaling a micro service. Technically, it is all about removing the server from your application. The name literally tells you so. It is true that removing the server can offer some benefits in the scaling realm. In particular, it allows you to scale to 0 now that you no longer have to keep the process alive to serve requests. Of course, that is not tradeoff…

Scaling to 0 is pretty much the only benefit you get. Which is not much of a benefit at any reasonable scale. Fargate is same firecracker VMs as Lambda they just don't scale to 0.

Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#89

Post by qaq »

dijit wrote: post #87
qaq wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you under the impression that CI/CD and observability is easy with lambda I have a bridge to sell you. I worked on a large scale pure serverless project we wrote more CDK code than application code.

That’s sad, I saw a one click deploy button in my IDE and made an assumption. What’s the point then if its not easier?

It scales to 0. Scaling to 0 and not having to write few lines Docker file is the only tangible benefits.

Re: Why aren't we all serverless yet?

#90

Post by jmclnx »

pluc wrote: post #9

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.

It is too bad plan9 did not take off, from what I read that system was designed for a serverless environment. You can use resources like memory, disk, cpu cycles from many other plan9 systems at the sametime.

Of course I think that would be a DRM nightmare for big-corps. One could stream items another person's system owns for "free" without dealing with companies.

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