Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by some_account 2872 days ago
My last job was running a lot of open source stuff and they spent maybe 20 hours per week troubleshooting things, multiple people together, while the rest of the team was waiting.

It was a complex environment with high availability though, with maybe 15 different types of software trying to work together...

After using AWS for a while, I have to say that things usually work and don't suddenly start to malfunction, even when not doing serverless.

Downsides of serverless is definently vendor lock in, but I think having the complexity of open source software in house, and being able to try new software, is a double edged sword that can cost huge money as well.

It's not a simple choice.

1 comments

It's not just lockin. It's troubleshooting Lambda. Here's a couple of questions and answers we've recently delved into:

- How do I avoid a cold start? (Fake calls into the system to the point where AWS has to start more instances of your application)

- Why is my cold start time different between development to production? (Production is in a VPC, which has greater instance spin up times)

- Why has Lambda stopped executing on my Kinesis stream? (Oops, AWS' bad)

- How can we get more parallel Lambda processing on a Kinesis stream? (Clone the stream and attach to the cloned stream)

- What can I do to reduce the cold start costs for Java? (Specify your objects as static, since those are evaluated at JVM startup, which AWS doesn't charge you for)

- How do I do Infrastructure as code? (CloudFormation; expect an average of 4 CF objects per function. SAM makes the CF more user friendly, but it's harder to debug and encourages the creation of extra infrastructure)

- How do I increase the bandwidth allocated to my Lambda? (Increase the memory allocation)

What can I do to reduce the cold start costs for Java? (Specify your objects as static, since those are evaluated at JVM startup, which AWS doesn't charge you for)

Well Java was the first mistake if you want a reasonable startup....