[jondubois]

I still cannot believe that we live in a world were:

- A website with a silly name like 'Facebook' is worth half a trillion dollars and is extremely profitable.

- A website with a silly name like 'Twitter' which only lets you post 140 characters at a time is worth 30 billion dollars.

- An app with a silly name like 'Snapchat' which loses billions of dollars per year is worth almost $15 billion.

- An international taxi service with a silly name like 'Uber' which is losing billions of dollars per year is worth almost $100 billion.

- That software developers don't see anything wrong with building apps on top of proprietary cloud APIs (e.g. Amazon Lambda) - The closest real-world analogy that I can think of is that it's like building a house with your own bare hands for years and then, once you finally finish it, you start paying a corporation rent (at whatever rate they ask for) so that you can live in your own house! Meanwhile, the whole time, there was an even better plot of land right next door which was 100% free but you ignored it because the signposts on the corporate land were flashing with bright neon lights.

The economy makes so little sense that there is no incentive left to create value. The best you can do is just look for the next financial scheme to take advantage of. I bet it will be something completely random and useless.

[pjc50]

Names are hard, and all of those except Uber are extremely apt and descriptive.

In the lambda case, it's very much closer to "build and maintain a house, doing all the trades work yourself" versus just renting somewhere. The latter has a much shorter lead time and upfront cost. If you're just doing a job for 18 months somewhere to see if it works out, would you spend a decade building a house there first?

[theamk]

Re Lambda, I think the closest analogy is renting unfurnished office.

When our company moved into next office, it had bare walls with old ugly wallpaper. We paid for the new wallpaper, carpet, interior walls, wiring, etc... And we also kept paying the rent to the building owner, and were at their mercy when they eventually decided to stop renting out that space.

Even then, this made perfect sense for business. All-new construction would have been way longer and more expensive, even taking limited lease time in the account. Why would software equivalent of this (Lambda) be different?

[jondubois]

>> bare walls with old ugly wallpaper

With Lambda, it's more like no walls at all... The land just comes with a concrete foundation but you have to build the walls and roof yourself.

[swagasaurus-rex]

Running your own servers doesn't require you to bid for sparse plots of land, like constructing your own office space does.

[scarface74]

Of all the “lock in” of AWS, lambda functions are the easiest to convert. Not only that, you can write a standard Node/Express C#/Web API, Python/Django service, throw a proxy on top of it and deploy it either to lambda or a standard server just by slightly tweaking your build pipeline.

A lambda function is nothing more than a standard app with an entry point with two arguments. Your handler function should be “skinny” just like a Controller action in a typical MVC framework.