[zmmmmm]

This post mingles different interpretations of "serverless" - the current fad of "lambda" style functions etc and premium / full stack managed application offerings like Heroku. Although they are both "fully managed" they have a lot of differences.

Both though assume the "hard" problem of infrastructure is the one-time setup cost, and that your architecture design should be centered around minimising that cost - even though it's mostly a one-time cost. I really feel like this is a false economy - we should optimise for long term cost, not short term. It may be very seductive that you can deploy your code within 10 minutes without knowing anything, but that doesn't make it the right long term decision. In particular when it goes all the way to architechting large parts of your app out of lambda functions and the like we are making a huge archtitectural sacrifice which is something that should absolutely not be done purely on the base of making some short term pain go away.

[deepzn]

what would you say is the architectural sacrifice of pushing things out to the edge, or using lambda functions per say in your opinion?

There are issues about resolving state at the edge, though Cloudflare has solved some of that with durable objects, and Fastly is working on something too. Think there are memory constraints as of now however. Security too is better in these platforms at the edge - true zero trust models.

[zmmmmm]

It's similar to the issues with microservices. You've broken something that could be "simple" single monolithic application into many pieces and now there is huge complexity in how they are all joined together, fragemented state, latency, transactional integrity, data models, error handling, etc etc. Then your developers can't debug or test them properly, what used to be a simple breakpoint in the debugger and stepping into a function call and directly observing state requires a huge complexity to trace what is happening.

All these things got much harder than they used to be, and you're living with that forever - to pay for a one-time saving on setting up some self-updating, auto-scaling infrastructure.

[erhk]

My god you've given me hope again

[dx034]

Not the person you asked but for me, the discussion of Edge computing often misses if there are actually enough benefits. Slow response times are nearly always because the application is slow, not because the server is 100ms away instead of 5ms. Saving 100ms (or less for most probably) by deploying logic at the edge introduces much more complexity than shaving that time off through optimization would. Take this page as an example. I get response times of ~270ms (Europe to US-West I presume) and it still loads instantly. On the other hand I have enough systems at my office where I'm <1ms away from the application server and still wait forever for stuff to load.

I don't say that you don't need edge computing. But it'll always be more complex to run compared to a centralized system (plus vendor lock-in) and performance isn't a valid reason.

[erikerikson]

Serverless is more than functions. Consider S3, LogicApps, or DataFlow.

Serverless is about starting with highly available, auto scaling, et cetera... assets and concentrating more on delivering business value.