Serverless: slower and more expensive

Re:Serverless: slower and more expensive by abiro on Monday September 23, 2019 @06:40AM (#21047582)

I don’t think it’s possible to produce empirical evidence to prove or disprove this claim, but it’s just common sense: Using managed services leads to writing less code and minimizing devops work, both resulting in more time for feature development that takes less time overall and produces higher quality service (latency, availability, etc). Then there is the added benefit of clear financial insight into the inner workings of the application (one can trace capital flows through functions) which will result in better resource allocation decisions.

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Re:Serverless: slower and more expensive by missosoup on Monday September 23, 2019 @06:45AM (#21047607)

> but it’s just common sense

No. There's nothing common sense about it. It only seems plausible if you read the sales brochure from a cloud vendor and have no experience with all the weird and whacky failure modes of these systems and the fact that none of the major selling points of serverless actually work as advertised unless you dedicate significant engineering time to make them work - as the GP comment has demonstrated. The amount of engineering time required to make serverless work quickly catches up to or even exceeds just doing the damn thing the normal way.

And that engineering time is not transferable to any other cloud vendor, and neither is your solution now. So congratulations you just locked your business in.

Serverless only makes sense if you have a fairly trivial problem and operate on really narrow margins where you need your infra and associated costs to scale up/down infinitely.

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Re:Serverless: slower and more expensive by abiro on Monday September 23, 2019 @06:52AM (#21047648)

> Serverless only makes sense if you have a fairly trivial problem

That’s exactly the point. The web application needs of most startups are fairly trivial and best supported by a serverless stack. Put it another way: If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago, then it’s serverless today.

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Re:Serverless: slower and more expensive by nostrademons on Monday September 23, 2019 @03:15PM (#21052486)

If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled.

As a side note, I've learned that the existence of a large number of viable ways to accomplish a task is a pretty big anti-signal for the desirability of accomplishing that task in the first place. When I started my career in 2000, there was a huge debate over whether the "right" way to develop a desktop application was MFC or .NET or Java or Visual Basic or Qt or WxWindows. The real answer was "don't develop desktop apps, because the web's about to take over". When the big web 2.0 businesses were founded from 2005-2011, there were basically two viable options for building a webapp: Rails or Django. Now that everyone's arguing about microservices vs. Docker vs. Kubernetes vs. serverless vs. Beanstalk vs. Heroku, it's likely that the real answer is "develop a blockchain app instead".

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Re:Serverless: slower and more expensive by outworlder on Monday September 23, 2019 @05:53PM (#21054156)

> If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled.

That's... not true. The choice of web stack – and, in fact, the whole software – is just a piece of what a startup may need.

Seriously, look at the list of YC startups on 2018 and tell me if most couldn't use either something like Rails, or a Single Page App In React With A Serverless Backend. And it wouldn't matter one bit.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/these-are-the-64-startups-...

> it's likely that the real answer is "develop a blockchain app instead".

I hope that was sarcasm.

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Re:Serverless: slower and more expensive by 1337shadow on Monday September 23, 2019 @04:27PM (#21053213)

> The web application needs of most startups are fairly trivial and best supported by a serverless stack.

Pretty subjective statements, I suppose we don't have the same definition of "trivial".

> If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago, then it’s serverless today.

Comparing the features of Rails or Django with serverless is like comparing a spaceship with a skateboard.

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Re:Serverless: slower and more expensive by mycall on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @12:31AM (#21056583)

Because the django was riding a rail on her skateboard and bumped into a spaceship?

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Re:Serverless: slower and more expensive by rifung on Monday September 23, 2019 @07:04PM (#21054717)

> Using managed services leads to writing less code and minimizing devops work, both resulting in more time for feature development that takes less time overall and produces higher quality service (latency, availability, etc).

Well, not necessarily? This assumes that the implementation is sound but it is not at all uncommon for abstractions to leak which end up causing more pain than they solve

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