[qweqwerwerwerwr]

are there real-world, commercial products actually running on """serverless""" architecture?

no matter how much I think about that whole concept, I see no application for it that couldn't be done better, faster and easier with regular tools

[lghh]

> are there real-world, commercial products actually running on """serverless""" architecture?

Yeah, thousands I would imagine. The last two companies I have worked at have been 100% serverless or nearly 100%.

> no matter how much I think about that whole concept, I see no application for it that couldn't be done better, faster and easier with regular tools

Considering you have to ask if there are _any_ products running in a serverless environment, I would imagine you need more exposure to the concept before you make such a large judgement on it.

[capableweb]

> Yeah, thousands I would imagine. The last two companies I have worked at have been 100% serverless or nearly 100%.

If you can answer (for legal or other reasons you might not be able to): What kind of monthly bills did your setup have and how many req/s did you serve (in lack of a better metric)? It'd also be useful to know average min/max response time if that's something you remember.

I wish that was a good way of evaluating "performance / price" but that's really hard... If someone know a better way to frame the question regarding price, it would be very helpful.

[lghh]

I can't list that, but both companies migrated to serverless and both companies are glad they did.

There is more than "raw dollar amount on monthly bill" to account for in cost, as well. For one, there's stability and the toll that takes on both your team and your customers. Not saying non-serverless apps are not stable by nature, but I've now been part of two teams that have seen the same types of benefits and those benefits line up with the "sales pitch" benefits.

[qweqwerwerwerwr]

what was the product and the scale then?

[lghh]

I'd rather not list my last two companies or their scale, but I can assure you they are real companies that exist, have users, and make money. I'm not sure why I even would be asked to.

[seabrookmx]

In my opinion (and at most places I've worked) serverless has been a great _complement_ to traditional deployment models (usually k8s).

For example, you have some background tasks (sending email, processing files, etc). It's very convenient to just push those into a queue and have serverless functions chew through them. They scale to zero, cold start time has no negative impact on the workload, you don't have to worry about k8s resource requests and scaling, etc.

I too am skeptical of using any serverless offering for serving HTTP API's or server-side rendered pages, atleast for non-trivial amounts of traffic. CloudRun can do it but only because it's a thin management layer on k8s/knative and even then networking config for anything other than CloudSQL is tedious (you have to deploy a proxy to access your VPC).

[ArrayBoundCheck]

I'm not particularly interested in serverless but my understanding is a developer doesn't need to know the server configuration and drops some code in. The service figures out how to route the domain to code and handle the storage, caching, etc

I rather know my configuration and use one big server with the static files on a CDN

[jppope]

Yes, there are many real-world completely serverless products and architectures. I've been working exclusively on serverless architectures for many years now, I have no plans on going back to provisioning servers or working with containers.

[dangoor]

It depends on what you categorize as “serverless”. I wrote about how Khan Academy is built on essentially serverless architecture and has millions of monthly users:

https://blog.khanacademy.org/the-original-serverless-archite...

[golergka]

There's plenty of real-world, commercial products which do not get extremely high loads but earn much more money on each request. They're mostly in B2B without sexy names and media coverage, though.

[valbaca]

I can assure you there absolutely are. When you need to handle billions of requests a day (like a worldwide seller must), then it works.

[nikanj]

Hot take: investors really are stupid enough to think ”servers/datacenters are a massive cost for large companies. A serverless solution should save them lots of money”

[wperron]

It's not a hot take, it's just a bad take, and a complete failure to understand the value proposition of these types of offerings (and why we're seeing so many of them pop up these days)