“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in” (2017)

Re:“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of propr... by femto113 on Monday February 04, 2019 @10:31PM (#19082836)

I'll echo this sentiment, and while it may sound like a philosophical position it really is pragmatic experience: it is nearly impossible to realize a gain from proactively implementing a multi-vendor abstraction. I've found this to hold in databases, third party services like payments and email, and very much so in cloud services. I instead recommend using services and APIs as they were designed and as directly (i.e. with as little abstraction) as possible. Only when and if you decide to add or switch to another vendor would be the time to either add an abstraction layer or port your code. I've never seen a case where the cost to implement two direct integrations was significantly more than the the cost to implement an abstraction, and many cases where an abstraction was implemented but only one vendor was ever used.

I'll note that I have no objection to abstractions per se, especially in cases where a community solution exists, e.g. Python's sqlalchemy is good enough that I'd seldom recommend directly using a database driver, Node's nodemailer is in many cases easier to use than lower level clients, etc.

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Re:“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of propr... by antonvs on Monday February 04, 2019 @10:59PM (#19082932)

It very much depends on the nature of the services and the abstractions.

I'm currently working on a system that has several multi-vendor abstractions - for file storage across AWS, GCP, NFS and various other things; for message queues across Kafka, GCP Pubsub, and direct database storage; for basic database storage (more key-value style than anything else) across a range of systems; for deployment on VMs, in containers, and bare metal; and various other things.

All of these things are necessary because it's a complex system that needs to be deployable in different clouds as well as on-prem for big enterprise customers with an on-prem requirement.

None of the code involved is particularly complex, and it's involved almost zero maintenance over time.

That would less be the case if you were trying to roll your own, say, JDBC or DB-agnostic ORM equivalent, but there are generally off the shelf solutions for that kind of thing.

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Re:“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of propr... by femto113 on Monday February 04, 2019 @11:36PM (#19083048)

I would never argue against doing it your case, but implementing an abstraction because multi-vendor support is an actual requirement is quite different from implementing an abstraction on top of a single vendor because you are trying to avoid "vendor lock-in".

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Re:“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of propr... by nicoburns on Monday February 04, 2019 @10:41PM (#19082866)

I agree with this, but would note that building an abstraction layer is not the only way to approach this issue. Just building the thing with half an eye on how you would port it over to a different platform is you needed to can make the difference between it being a straightforward like-for-like conversion, and having to rearchitect the entire app...

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