[paulgb]

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 power cycled.

So congrats on the funding, I hope you can convert some haters :)

[1] obligatory plug: https://notify.run

[Zelphyr]

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.

[laumars]

I don't disagree with you that serverless is a step backwards if you want control about your running platform but your debugger example can be argued away by the fact that you shouldn't really be debugging a live platform. If your code is portable enough to run "serverless" then you should be able to spin up a docker container or whatever and run the same tests in there.

I think the issue is some people see "serverless" as an all or nothing scenario which it really isn't. Some problems are solved well with serverless and some are not. It's like the container vs virtual machine argument. One isn't designed to replace another - they're just different tools for solving different problems; each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

[Zelphyr]

How do I debug locally/on Docker with services like SNS and ElasticTranscoder? I know there are emulators but those have gaps in services that providers like AWS offer. Not to mention, I'm debugging with an emulator and not the real thing.

[scarface74]

I can’t speak for ElasticTranscoder, but there is nothing stopping you from running your lambda function locally and still connect to all of the AWS services.

Just like people have been calling their controller actions from test harnesses for ages to test their APIs. You can call call your handler the same way.

At the end of the day, AWS is just passing you a JSON message. You can call your lambda function manually with the same JSON payload locally.

[laumars]

This is exactly how we test our lambda code that call AWS media encoders

[laumars]

You could run the docker container on an EC2 instance or have an SSH bastion / VPN tunnel between yourself and your AWS VPC.

I tend to opt for the SSH tunnel route for personal projects but use OpenVPN with a secrets management (eg Vault or AWS's new key store) for professional projects (ie when you have several people on your team).

AWS is versatile enough that you do actually have several options available to you.

[matchagaucho]

Serverless architecture certainly benefits from a localhost-first environment with mock data and unit test feedback prior to deployment.

But then... any architecture benefits from localhost-first.

[Zelphyr]

We found that the further we got into using different services the more difficult local development became. I just assumed that, as in the old days of web development, we would be forced into not being able to do local development at all. So then we'd have to have duplication of services. One for development and one for production. Or multiples for development so that each developer didn't step on the toes of the other. There goes the cost savings touted by Serverless Architecture.

These are problems that will be solved eventually, I have no doubt. But they haven't been solved yet and that is what makes Serverless Architecture not ready for prime time in my opinion.

[laumars]

It's good practice to have separation of dev and prod service anyway. I don't see that as duplication, I see that as different operating environments.

Even back in the days of self hosting, I've lost track of the number of times a Dev script has gone wild and caused excessive load on the RDBMS or tried to spam the SMTP relay. On a Dev environment you can catch that without affecting live services.

As for the other issues you meantioned, this is nothing new. There have always been appliances in IT. Whether it is physical rack mountable appliances like hardware video encoders, or SaaS solutions on a public cloud like AWS media transcoders, you interact with then the same. The only difference with public cloud solutions is you you first have to bridge your office network with your AWS (or whatever) virtual private network. Thankfully you have a variety of tools at your disposal to do that. (Over the years I've used no less than 4 different methods to bridge a local network with an AWS VPC - each taking advantage of their own specific business requirements).

[mmt]

> There have always been appliances in IT.

Indeed, and, as a general rule, they were astonishingly expensive, especially in up-front purchase cost.

> The only difference with public cloud solutions

I posit that another difference is that the up-front cost is approximately zero. That makes the adoption decision much easier (even possible in the first place) for much smaller companies, especially startups.

That also means what would otherwise have been an up-front cost is hidden in the pay-as-you-go cost.

That cost-hiding does create a new problem, albeit a sublte on. A startup faced with having to buy a $300k appliance might think nothing of it if there were a smaller/dev version available for $30k for that environment. However, if that appliance actually needed to be duplicated in the full $300k form [1] in both (or maybe more, if they have stage/qa/integration, research, and/or multiple dev envs), that startup would take a serious look at alternatives. Those relative costs aren't as stark with the cloud version of applicances, until well after the choice has been made.

[1] Or, worse, an even more expensive version, if dev, testing and/or research use of the appliance is heavier than production. I expect that's a rare, outside of storage.

[jjeaff]

Localhost first is ideal. But not always possible.

[eyjafjallajokul]

Can you explain why?

[Zelphyr]

Why its ideal or not always possible?

Ideal because it's faster development time. And free since I'm not paying Amazon compute time to run my code while I write it.

Not always possible because I don't have AWS's services locally. As mentioned elsewhere, there are emulators but, by virtue of their emulation, may not always perform like the real thing. That's a debugging ball of wax that I personally hate having to untangle.

[scarface74]

Which services are you using for which you are concerned about cost while you are developing?

You can access most (all?) of AWS services without running on AWS EC2/Lambda.

[chii]

Can't these services be mocked out? Surely you are wrapping the service API with your own code to prevent vendor lock in right?

[jjeaff]

Proprietary software or hidden configurations. I have my site on localhost docker container. But I can't spin up an Aurora instance. So I use a similar mysql container. But it's not exactly the same.

And sometimes the data is too large to have fully on localhost. You can work with a subset, but if you have a 2tb database, it's not feasible to have the whole thing local for testing.

[dsp1234]

Want a debugger? Nope.

https://www.markheath.net/post/remote-debugging-azure-functi...

[Zelphyr]

That's great. I'm sure Amazon and Google will follow suit. But they're not there yet and Amazon is the big guy that most people are on.

As I've said before; these are all problems that all of the cloud providers will solve eventually. But until they do I'm not sold on building a production application on a Serverless Architecture.

[inopinatus]

These are complaints about the immaturity of the implementations. About which I’m inclined to agree but still recognise that the architectural style has legs.

[stcredzero]

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.

So what if I gave you a command-line tool to simply make the current code in your development environment live?

Want a debugger? Nope.

And I also gave you live step debugging, plus replays of recent server state?

Want log files? Gotta get them from a different service that frequently has a lag of 30 seconds or more.

And the logs from the instance you're debugging are available instantly?

[hayd]

I'm a big fan of serverless, but these are valid questions to which there really ought to be better answers than "nope".

[stcredzero]

I'm working on making all of those a "yup."

[rawrmaan]

I think a lot of people have tried “serverless” and found it to present more challenges than it solves. How, for example, do you connect to a Postgres database from Lambda/Cloud Functions? As far as I can tell, the answer is: You don’t, you use a different database.

No-worries devops experiences are nothing new. See Heroku.

[yoran]

I think the example you give is more because there's a mismatch between technologies, rather than the "fault" of serverless. In serverless, your endpoints become infinitely scalable. This doesn't go well when they're backed by technologies where there is a hard limit on the number of connections, for instance SQL servers or a Redis server. I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless "because it brings so many other issues". I think AWS has already started that with Amazon Aurora.

That aside, I agree that there are a lot of secondary concerns that are important when running things in production but that aren't available out-of-the-box when you run something on AWS Lambda. I'm thinking about error monitoring, performance monitoring, logging,... All those things need to be set up and that's quite time-consuming.

However, I think that's more due to serverless being relatively new and not as mature as the traditional way of doing. I don't think it will take long before we'll have the equivalent for serverless of adding `gem 'newrelic_rpm'` to your Gemfile and magically having performance and error monitoring across your app.

[rantanplan]

> I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless

Empty statement that means nothing. SQL/RDBMS is backed by computer science and robust engineering examples that make the world spin. Alternatives are usually full of fanfare and false promises.

> I think AWS has already started that with Amazon Aurora.

Just in time when we were talking about fanfare. Spend 10-20 minutes searching on the Internets to see what actual experiences people have with it.

Its 3X write increase? Bollocks. Usually the performance is worse than when you administer your own DB(Postgresql/MySQL). You might(or not) see some read-performance increase, which... well everyone can scale on reads so I don't see the point.

I suspect it has other goodies pertaining to administration/provisioning, but performance/scaling is not one of them.

[athenot]

>> I think therefore that SQL database technologies have to adapt to the serverless paradigm rather than dismissing serverless

> Empty statement that means nothing. SQL/RDBMS is backed by computer science and robust engineering examples that make the world spin. Alternatives are usually full of fanfare and false promises.

Traditional relational databaases have indeed solved many issues that some newer datastores struggle with. But the flip side is that it is non-trivial to design traditional databases that are not Single Points Of Failure.

Storing data is surprizingly hard in a cloud environment, and involves trade-offs. Reaching a comprehensive solution (fast, HA, consistent, easily recoverable, scalable volum, evolvable schemas...) is hard no matter what technology you pick.

[justincormack]

Not being able to handle more than a few connections without connection pooling is nothing to do the using SQL. It is just a different bit of optimization that is needed to support fast transient connections without pooling.

[rawrmaan]

It just seems to me like the "infinite scalability" promise of serverless is only realistic if you have no database. Because inevitably, you'll hit database scaling issues due to query patterns and suboptimal indexes LONG before you'll have a hard time scaling up your fleet of servers because you're getting too many requests.

[zaarn]

I'd also like to see the AWS bill once you hit infinite scale. AWS is already pretty expensive on their own...

[ryanworl]

You connect the same way as you do in a regular app. Which is to say, you open the database connection outside of the request handling method (for example, as a global) and then use it from within the request handling method. When your app wakes up again for another request, the database connection is still open and you just use it.

[qudat]

As far as I know this works but more as a hack not as a robust officially supported solution.

[scarface74]

How is that a “hack”? You create your DB and you get a connection string to a publicly accessible database or you create it inside a VPC and you configure your lambda to run inside a subnet within your VPC and you configure your security group. This can all be configured within the console.

[nrb]

The main issue with this approach is that running your lambda in a VPC results in painfully slow cold starts, on AWS at least.

[paulddraper]

IDK why the parent mentioned VPC. It's not necessary.

[brylie]

I may misunderstand your comment.

That said, where I work (MaaS Global) we have a production PostgreSQL database hosted on AWS Relational Database Service (RDS):

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/

We connect to the AWS RDS instance in our lambda functions using an ES library called knex.js and some environment variables to store the DB credentials:

https://knexjs.org/

[joecot]

How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC? Are you pre-warming your lambda functions? Did you open up your RDS instance to the world so you could connect to it from a public lambda network? I know you had to pull some magic, because I've been down that road.

It's been a problem for years and there's been no sign of a solution. Example article from last month: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/lambda-vpc-cold-starts-a-lat...

These are the sorts of problems that turn people off from using serverless architectures.

[kauju]

Your right that the cold start times are not ideal. But you get a huge free request load per month. Put an uptime pinger on it and keep it warm. Or do what I do and write your functions in golang. My average cold start time is around 4 seconds.

For the DB connection you put the lambda in the same vpc that the RDS exists in. Then you open the connection pool and reuse it if its active. Not that a new connection is a big overhead over leveraging an established socket.

Wonder where all this misinformation is coming from on lambda DB access issues.

[sbov]

I know uptime pingers are easy and obvious solutions (I use them myself), but everytime I have to resort to this sort of hack it reminds me of how immature serverless is.

[joecot]

Here's the problem. Uptime pingers work great if you have a low volume service. You keep 1, 2, or maybe 3 instances of the function warm, and you don't have to deal with cold start times. But there's 2 places that idea falls seriously flat.

1. This doesn't work if you were actually trying to build your API as microservices. You might have 60+ functions, some which call each other, and keeping them all warm is not really a good option.

2. Keeping a minimum number of instances warm fails to account for half the point of using serverless architectures: being able to scale. Sure, if you have little to no traffic, you can keep a couple instances warm and be up, but if your app needs to scale to 5 or 10 or more instances to handle bursts of traffic, the surfers who hit that cold start end up dealing with an extremely bad experience.

More importantly, as Lambda gets more popular, uptime pingers get less and less useful because of tragedy of the commons. The reason for needing cold starts at all is that AWS is rotating out instances to be able to keep up with overall demand with limited resourcs. If only a few people are sending heartbeats to their instances, their instances stay in rotation because other people's get rotated out instead. If everyone is sending heartbeat requests, some of them will still end up getting rotated out, and therefore everyone will need to increase the frequency of the heartbeat requests to keep their functions warm. It's not a sustainable solution, and I'm baffled that AWS tacitly promotes it as a resolution to the problem they themselves have caused.

It's been years. AWS needs to fix Lambda VPC cold starts.

[wahnfrieden]

AWS is fixing it by moving to IAM authentication in the serverless ecosystem, rather than network segmentation. Serverless Aurora will support IAM auth at scale via its HTTP query protocol.

Keeping Lambda functions warm is great until you have 2 or more requests hitting the function simultaneously. They won't queue behind the pre-warmed function, they will spin up additional Lambda containers to serve in parallel. Unless you don't expect to get concurrent requests, there's no effective way to pre-warm Lambda functions.

[dpeck]

Have any data on the variance on that 4 second average? That sounds very tolerable on its face.

[jchrisa]

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-fauna-spa/blob/master/src/T...

[joecot]

AWS also has NoSQL cloud solutions, particularly DynamoDB, and maybe SimpleDB if you want to risk building on a someday deprecated service.

Those options work fine, if you were OK with using a NoSQL DB. But what if you wanted to use an actual relational database? For that you pretty much need Lambda in VPC, and it's not really usable because of the cold start issue.

At some point Amazon will release Aurora Serverless[1], giving a serverless option for an on demand relational database. Will that work somehow with Lambda without needing VPC, therefore defeating the cold start issue? What cold start issues we'll it have itself? I guess we'll wait and see for now.

1. https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

[cmjqol]

> 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.

[jchrisa]

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?

[com2kid]

> How do you deal with the 10+ second cold start times for Lambda when using it in a VPC?

And I was complaining about 500ms cold start times on Firebase Functions.

I think I'll stop complaining now.

[wahnfrieden]

It’s still the early days so there are pain points, but Amazon already announced a solution to this: Serverless Aurora. It’ll be some time still until it’s public and Lambda-friendly though. And MySQL comes before Postgres.

[nodesocket]

With Google Cloud Functions (they got the name right), you can simply link with a Cloud SQL instance using a special local socket interface provided by Google Cloud[1]. Their documentation provides complete examples as well on how to use global connection pools for MySQL and PostgreSQL.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/sql

[rawrmaan]

Okay, that's a great solution. I actually had no idea that was possible.

[all_blue_chucks]

> How, for example, do you connect to a Postgres database from Lambda/Cloud Functions?

Exactly the same way you would with an EC2 instance...

[tango12]

Might not be that easy because only postgres can take a few hundreds of connections which won't work out if you have a few thousands of serverless functions? No persistent connection pools.

[somebodythere]

Well, just put the connection logic outside of the main handler so it's shared between invocations!

Wait, oops, you have state now.

[rhlsthrm]

Realistically could you do this with Redis or something similar? Not sure about security implications of this though...

[GordonS]

How do you handle database connection pooling?

[ironjunkie]

I fully agree with you. Based on my experience, Lambda is perfect if you only want to perform some relatively standalone task (such as a compute intensive rendering). As soon as it needs to connect to 3rd party entities, it becomes very slow and loses some of its benefits. Connecting Lambda to an AWS DB for example is challenging to say the least. It also takes a couple tens milliseconds just to setup the DB socket and connection, that on a normal server can simply remain open and wait for the next request.

Serverless is nice, but the ecosystem of serverless tool is really missing today IMO

[scarface74]

Connecting Lambda to an AWS DB for example is challenging to say the least.

Why does this keep getting repeated? You get a publicly accessible host and use the same drivers you use on prem or you put both the lambda and the database inside your VPC.

[bmilleare]

As others have pointed out, connecting to RDS from Lambda is actually pretty trivial by having them run in the same VPC. We actually came up against an issue where our Lambda function needed access to RDS but also to the outside World which meant some extra hurdles to jump [1] but overall our experience with Lambda has been a positive one.

I don't think we'll be considering a fully serverless architecture anytime soon due to cold-start times, but it's awesome for anything outside of the user request/response loop or internal microservices where response time is perhaps not such of a problem.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/inter...

[dhdersch]

Umm, for AWS, you place the Lambda function into a VPC and open a db connection the same way you would from another server?

[spullara]

I think what they are referring to is that Postgres and most other databases were built in the before time, the long long ago when every connection was a process and you limited concurrency of connections in the configuration file. If you have a 1000 concurrent calls on lambda you aren't going to be able to have them all talking to the same database at the same time. You'll run out of connections and the application will crash. Same reason you see this happen to PHP web applications when HN or Slashdot is pointed at them and they say they can't connect to the database. They have hit the concurrency limit. Connection pooling solves this problem but currently requires another layer between the application and the database.

[scarface74]

What do you mean, how do you connect? The same way you connect on prem. Using, the Postgres drivers. You can either have a publicly accessible Postgres instance with a DNS entry (not recommended) or you can run both the DB and the lambda inside of a VPC.

[dpeck]

That’s really what’s keeping me from developing stuff with it. I can get the job done with dynamodb but I’m really looking forward to building something with Postgres in a “serverless” context.

[ac360]

imo, the most interesting data point is how in demand serverless architectures are WITH these issues. Imagine how compelling serverless will be once these issues are solved.

[chx]

Serverless is a buzzword for a distributed system you can't SSH into.

[paulgb]

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 :)

[old-gregg]

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.

[lowercased]

can't and not needing to are two really different things. the 'not needing to' just being shifted to having to use proprietary environments for doing stuff essential to debugging (like looking at log files) is, for most people, not a net win.

[manigandham]

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.

[k__]

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.

[castlecrasher2]

> Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, AppSync, Device Farm, Aurora, etc. are all serverless.

Yep. Lambda may be functions-as-a-service, which is a great name for it, but the whole shebang is more than that. Thus, serverless.

[detaro]

How would you distinguish it from "PaaS"?

[k__]

The "serverless" model frees you of more tasks than PaaS, like capacity planning and scaling, also it's more flexible and fault tolerant.

[staticassertion]

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 there is a “server”, but I don’t have to think about it.

[manigandham]

No server to manage is the least important part of it all. It should describe the abstraction that's actually being offered: IaaS is servers, PaaS is a single app, FaaS is individual function, SaaS is just software.

Any of those other than IaaS itself can be "serverless".

[staticassertion]

> No server to manage is the least important part of it all.

OK, well it's the most important part for me. I don't want to manage patching a box.

[manigandham]

Sure, but there have always been options for that, regardless of abstraction level.

[staticassertion]

I don't know of an abstraction that provides FaaS + Managed System other than serverless - what are you referring to?

[detaro]

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?

[staticassertion]

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.

[Yver]

I can't say much about its technical merits but I find it misleading that an application be described as "serverless" when in actuality it very much uses servers. The "serverless" moniker comes from the Serverless Framework, produced by Serverless, Inc. "Serverless" is the name of a product and should be capitalized accordingly.

[everdev]

I think the biggest knock against serverless is the same as microservices: your points of failure grow significantly.

[staticassertion]

I don't see how. Your points of failure were always there, but at most they're more explicit since "service failure" conflates with "network failure" - something I think is beneficial, since you always had to handle "service failures" but they were implicit.

That is - a piece of code in a monolith may fail, and a piece of code in a microservice may fail, but I've already written the code to handle network errors for the microservice case, which means I've also implicitly handled the "bug in code" case.

[SahAssar]

That assumes that a local function call has the same failure rate as a remote function call to a microservice, which in my experience is very much not true.

If I have a local function in the same language I can pretty much assume that a call to that function will actually call that function. With a remote call over HTTP or whatever I can't, so that is an additional failure I need to handle.

[staticassertion]

I'm not sure I understand. Why would an RPC call a different function than what you expect?

I'll grant you that there is more complexity in this approach, but I believe that fault tolerance is something you improve with microservices, not something you regress on.

[squeaky-clean]

It's not that it would call a different function, but that sometimes the RPC will fail to call the function. You can't get a network error calling a function which is in memory on the same process.

[staticassertion]

This is what I was saying though.

Yes, you have to handle the failure case of "network call". Microservices add this failure case. But you already had to handle the case of "code blew up because of a bug".

By forcing you to handle comm errors like network failure, you also force people, implicitly, to handle "code blew up because of a bug" errors. Even though it adds a second error case, you pretty much handle them the same way in the same place.

There was always an error case - the fact that code may blow up.

[moduspol]

The points of failure you are responsible for maintaining decrease significantly, though.

And the ones you aren't responsible for are ones that the rest of the world uses every day at 1000x the scale you do.

[skohan]

I just hope the API has stabilized. I worked on a project a couple of years ago using serverless, and we sunk a ton of time into fixing breaking changes after updates.

[tenaciousDaniel]

I help run a Node server, and we have some jobs that aren't run through CRON, but instead are set up using in-memory intervals. So I'm considering using a serverless setup to offload the work.

In your opinion, it easy to differentiate between dev/prod environments for development? How about logging?

[qudat]

Logging by default sucks for Lambdas. Because lambdas are not "servers" they do not have an external IP address, which means that if they want to communicate with the external world, you need to setup a NAT for it.

Differentiating dev/prod is not too bad, everything is labelled based on your naming scheme for serverless.

Having said that I think lambdas are a great use case for cron jobs.

[nostalgeek]

> 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'.

[wnsire]

> 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 :)

[na85]

I think it's due to the fact that the terminology seems intentionally misleading at worst, and like a marketing buzzword at best.

Every technical person understands there's still a server there. So it seems like a marketing tactic intent on misleading clueless CEOs.

[dragonwriter]

> I think it's due to the fact that the terminology seems intentionally misleading at worst, and like a marketing buzzword at best.

Originally it was a marketing buzzowrd designed to make Amazon's FaaS offering seem like a bigger deal than it was, and somewhat misleading in that role because FaaS of the type it was applied to aren't any more serverless (even from the perspective of what the customer needs to manage) than common PaaS offerings.

OTOH, I kind of like the way Google seems to have adopted it as a blanket term for cloud services where the customer is not concerned with physical or virtual servers as such; it seems the term.is being wrestled into being descriptive and non-deceptive.

> Every technical person understands there's still a server there. So it seems like a marketing tactic intent on misleading clueless CEOs.

The non-existence of servers isn't what it communicates, only technical people who also lack any sense of what matters to business world think that. (It's also targeted more to CTOs/CIOs than CEOs).

[paulgb]

> Every technical person understands there's still a server there.

Everybody also knows that a wireless vacuum has wires inside it, the value prop is that the wires never get in your way. And so with serverless.

[pbreit]

I don't think it compares to the move to the cloud. The cloud was a lot easier to setup than dedicated and the end result was basically the same...you got a server. Serverless is quite a different paradigm and the benefits are less obvious.

[matte_black]

Lack of connection pooling for database connections means serverless architecture will never be used for serious data heavy apps.

[wahnfrieden]

AWS already solving this with Serverless Aurora.

[whistlerbrk]

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

[patrickg_zill]

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?

[gazarsgo]

in AWS Fargate, of course...

[matte_black]

Try it.

[rightbyte]

Serverless in this context is Server-aaS. It's doublespeak. That's why I "knee-jerk".

Instead of a couple of servers you have thousands of small virtual servers running on real server and call that serverless. It's comical.

I wonder what hell this approach will be for legacy serverless systems where there is stuff running everywhere and no one got a clue where to pull the plug or patch stuff.

[gaius]

I don't understand the knee-jerk opposition people have to serverless architectures

It’s the name. It infuriates people because obviously there still really are servers. But I think of it like WiFi - there still are wires, you just don’t see them.

[mmt]

I've read this analogy before, but it's weak enough to be inapplicable.

With wireless networking and even phones, the wires have actually been eliminated, replaced wholesale by something else, radio. A better analogy would be something like the powerline ethernet systems, but nobody is calling them something controversial like "wireless" or "cableless".

Put another way, I've seen cloud computing (of which "serverless" is, arguably, merely an evolution into increasing levels of abstraction) called "somebody else's servers". The equivalent with the Wifi analogy would be "somebody else's wires", and, usually, what wires there are, for the backhaul [1], aren't even somebody else's.

EDIT:

Ultimately, my point is this:

The analogy is weak becasue WiFi is not an abstraction layer on top of wired networking that merely hides the existence of (and, ideally, some of the downsides of dealing with) the wires, instead being a different technology with different upsides and downsides. Serverless is such an abstraction layer.

[1] Which brings up a nitpick: Wifi can remain even wireless in its entirety, with various mesh networking techniques.

[laumars]

Except there literally isn't any wires in WiFi. Unless you're talking about power cables on access points or other unrelated tech used on devices that have ethernet / whatever AS WELL AS WiFi?

[pvg]

All-caps italics is an interesting choice. Is that both emphasized AND shouted?

[laumars]

Haha yeah on reflection it does look a bit silly. I was intending for it just to stand out against the camelcase of "WiFi" but the caps was a poor choice in hindsight.