Re:XML Is the Future
by senttoschool on Monday June 26, 2023 @01:08AM
(#36475938)
My main points are Vercel/Next.js focused.
1. That's extra cost and complexity and it's still a dedicated server.
2. If it's a min scaling of 1, isn't that just a server?
3. In the context of using APIs written inside Next.js for your mobile application.
4. Sure, Cloud Run is nice. I remember using Docker with Cloud Run as well. But it's a bit different than my main gripe with Next.js/Vercel.
1. Amazon provides things like RDS Proxy, which is essentially a hosted version of pgbouncer, and Aurora, essentially a "serverless postgres" - no need to manage your own server for connection pooling.
2. Cloud vendors have largely fixed the cold start times through a variety of means like min scaling of 1, warming requests, and functions that can process many requests simultaneously.
3. I don't get your point about not being able to share an API between web and mobile. I do this all the time.
4. When it comes to vendor lock-in, GCP for example offers Cloud Run, which will essentially just spin up any Docker container you give to it.
Managing your own servers can have a huge cost, and this can be an especially large cost for a small team. For example, does your business have any SOC 2 or other compliance requirements? Being on serverless as opposed to being on, say, your own EC2 instances, means a huge amount of work (e.g. ensuring servers are always patched, ensuring they are configured securely, ensuring you have permissions configured correctly, etc.) can be offloaded to the cloud provider, who is frankly much more likely to do it correctly than a small startup team.
If anything, I think GCP's CloudRun is awesome and the real future of serverless. In my mind it has most of the benefits of something like kubernetes with about 1/50th of the complexity.