[Zelphyr]

In my experience, the developer time it takes to get a serverless application running (on AWS anyway) far exceeds the benefits that serverless brings. We spent over six months on a project written in serverless that we could never really get working properly. We dumped all that code and rewrote it on a standard LAMP stack in less than half that time. Factoring in that the problem was better understood the second time around, it would still have been cheaper to build it the way we are from the beginning.

[scarface74]

Was that due more to lack of training? I am first and foremost a developer, but I’ve spent weeks understanding AWS from a netops, devops and development standpoint.

I’m also working on certifications mostly as a method to force me to learn in a structure manner, my company will pay for them, and they still have some market value.

[romaniv]

Training also takes time.

[scarface74]

Are you proposing that developers shouldn’t study and learn about whatever infrastructure they are using?

[romaniv]

I'm not proposing anything. I'm saying that training should be factored in when considering development costs. The notion that training is always a one-time investment that can be pretty much ignored if you plan to stick with some tech long-term is a fallacy.

[scarface74]

Things get added to AWS all of the time, but if are using the same set of services, training is a one time thing. Amazon doesn’t just pull the rug out from under you.

[tjoff]

Isn't that the whole point of the cloud?

I mean, if you care about the infrastructure there are few reasons left not to self-host.

[scarface74]

The point of the cloud is not to be ignorant about the infrastructure. It’s to not have to babysit hardware and focus on your core competency - let someone else do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. I’ve seen cases where “AWS Architects” spun up a bunch of EC2 instances and ran thier own services that had AWS managed equivalents and wonder why everything costs more.

Could it possibly be things like they have 3 EC2 instances to run a cluster for Consul instead of using AWS services?

It’s slso about elasticity. It’s much easier and cost effective to spin up 20 VMs (whether it be EC2 instances or Lambdas which are basically VMs) to run a test and see how many you actually need.

Other times it makes sense to use a bunch of spot instances to save money and choose a cost optimization based on throughout vs. cost for backend processing.