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A comment on Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99%.

Re:Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99% by jerf on Monday October 30, 2017 @09:45AM (#15584915)
Honest question for discussion: How much of "serverless'" advantage is the "serverless" aspect, and how much is the advantage of breaking functions down into stateless functions?

While I'm confident that it's not "zero" in either case, it still sort of feels to me that people are praising serverless for some things they could get if they had the discipline to write stateless functions in the first place. (And maybe keep the debugging functionality and the other infrastructure we've built up for normal apps.) And as with many things when it comes to "cloud" tech, it seems to me that people are a bit too bedazzled by the advantages to come to a clear understanding of the disadvantages.

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Re:Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99% by tdb7893 on Monday October 30, 2017 @10:25AM (#15585182)
I thought the main advantage of "serverless" was that you didn't have to provision and maintain servers.
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Re:Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99% by mrep on Monday October 30, 2017 @10:41AM (#15585274)
Also automatic autoscaling and it can be cheaper since you utilize basically all of your billed Compute instead of overprivisioning server capacity.
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Re:Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99% by jerf on Monday October 30, 2017 @10:28AM (#15585198)
Yes, that would be the "serverless" aspect I referred to.
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Re:Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99% by maxxxxx on Monday October 30, 2017 @09:53AM (#15584976)
The same seems to be true for microservices. People can't or don't want to write well structured code so they need to be forced to do it by running different parts of their code on different machines.
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Re:Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99% by pjc50 on Monday October 30, 2017 @10:25AM (#15585186)
I thought microservices were mostly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law in action?
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Re:Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99% by mrep on Monday October 30, 2017 @10:43AM (#15585286)
Depends how micro they are. I've seen teams own dozens of stupidly small microservices.
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Re:Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99% by maxxxxx on Monday October 30, 2017 @10:29AM (#15585210)
Yes that makes sense.
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Re:Occupy the cloud: distributed computing for the 99% by abakker on Monday October 30, 2017 @02:18PM (#15587509)
it is also a potential piecemeal way to migrate a monolithic app to the cloud. It can be used to offload a function from a larger applications that doesn't scale well with the application itself. (i.e. batch analytics). It can also be a nifty way to a specific function in a different tech stack if that makes it easier.
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