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

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

#91

Post by detaro »

staticassertion wrote: post #84
manigandham wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

We called that "PaaS" for years, why does it need a new name suddenly? Especially a new name that can cause confusion with things that actually do not have a dedicated server?

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

#92

Post by detaro »

k__ wrote: post #45
manigandham wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I know, serverless isn't just FaaS. As you pointed out FaaS is to connect things, nothing more. For me serverless is pay-as-you go pricing, no over- or under-provisioning and last but not least, no server-management. Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, AppSync, Device Farm, Aurora, etc. are all serverless.

How would you distinguish it from "PaaS"?

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

#93

Post by staticassertion »

detaro wrote: post #91
staticassertion wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

We called that "PaaS" for years, why does it need a new name suddenly? Especially a new name that can cause confusion with things that actually do not have a dedicated server?

I think PaaS is overly broad.

And yes, marketing is a real thing, and names are also picked because they sound cool. There are worse things.

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

#94

Post by old-gregg »

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 :)

The comment above probably meant to say that any environment becomes "serverless" as soon as you stop managing instances/servers manually and interact with it strictly via an API endpoint, which of course has always been possible but required fairly in-depth knowledge of AWS APIs (or other cloud provider's).

Look, there's nothing dirty about re-framing the conversation every once in a while. It may feel like BS at first but over time we attach new meaning to old words and it becomes easier to communicate capabilities.

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

#95

Post by bradhe »

pmlnr wrote: post #22

The coming age of people with no understanding of what running code actually means, no idea how hardware/close to hardware systems behave deep down, is going to be fabulous, and full of wasted computing.

> and full of wasted computing.

The amount of waste already present would boggle your damn mind.

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

#96

Post by eropple »

always_good wrote: post #79
eropple wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you know what your doing you can write elegant, performance tuned, secure and maintainable code in a dynamic language. You can! You totally can. But, statistically speaking? You probably won't. Neither will I. And that's why the minimal level of guardrails I'll put up with in 2018 is TypeScript and I'd really rather have better.

You're rehashing the old dynamic- vs static-typed debate. But what the upstream comment said was just wrong: that because documentation and database are statically-typed, then the application must be. It doesn't really make sense. See their use of "impossible". For example, your database types or your application types aren't what your API documentation annotates. Your docs annotate your endpoint contracts, not the i…

If you take "must" in the pocket-protectory overly-literal way, yeah, sure. But when you act generously and decent and take it to reference what is tenable and acceptable, things take a different turn. And it is in that light that I approach the topic and the speaker, because generosity and decency are pretty good things.

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

#97

Post by wnsire »

nostalgeek wrote: post #90
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'.

> because it's purely a marketing concern, it means nothing from an architectural standpoint

Serverless computing is an system architecture design that focus emphasis is abstracting the entirety of the infrastructure to let developers focus solely on code.

Per say , with AWS Lamba + API Gateway + S3 developers can create Web Application that usually required EC2 Servers and web framework like Spring , Laravel etc...

Apps hosted on AWS with EC2 requires strong knowledge in system architecture and system design . They also are quiet complex to scale , monitor and manage.

Serverless abstract all this and lets you focus only on code.

AWS Lambda is self healing meaning when a function crash , only that function crash not the entire server , API Gateway is managed by AWS it won't crash ( or very unlikely ) S3 , as i'm concerned , as never let me down.

Meaning I could author an entire application similar to Hacker News without any "Server" logically speaking, technically speaking there is always a server just like NoSQL doesn't mean "NO SQL" but "Not Only SQL" and is not buzzword :)

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

#98

Post by jchrisa »

cmjqol wrote: post #58
jchrisa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer offers FaunaDB with a pay-per-request pricing model. To bypass cold-start lambda issues, I code the app to talk directly to the database. For certain richer functions I might invoke a Lambda, but for basic crud operations the database access control does the trick. And no cold-start issue. Here's the data model part of my todo app if you want to see queries in the app: https://github.com/fauna/todomvc-fau…

> My employer offers FaunaDB with a pay-per-request pricing model. Tried FaunaDB few month ago the latency was beyond 200ms for a simple a read , and beyond 600ms for an insert. Would not recommend it at this point.

We don’t expect you to see that lag. Other users don’t see it or haven’t reported it. What region are you accessing in and how did you generate the result?

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

#99

Post by gazarsgo »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #48
whistlerbrk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not necessarily into this serverless thing but that doesn't seem like a valid complaint, use a global connection pooler like pgbouncer

Does e.g. Amazon's offering have a way to do that? Or is there still a cold start time? Where do you run the pgbouncer that is always running?

in AWS Fargate, of course...

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

#100

Post by Zelphyr »

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…

It feels like a giant step backward from a development standpoint. It's as bad or worse than the days when I had to make a change, save it, FTP that file to the server, refresh, lather-rinse-repeat. Want a debugger? Nope. Want log files? Gotta get them from a different service that frequently has a lag of 30 seconds or more[1]. Don't get me started on the massive vendor lock-in inherent with a Serverless Architecture[2].

Don't get me wrong; from a resources management and scaling perspective it's great. But that doesn't outweigh the massive pain during development that it creates.

We're in the process of rebuilding a project to move everything out of a Serverless Architecture. After six months of building it on serverless we finally all agreed it was a big mistake.

[1] That's our experience with AWS. May be different with other providers.

[2] I recognize that Serverless Framework helps mitigate this but that's just yet another abstraction on top of abstractions in my opinion.

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