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by pwinnski 1321 days ago
My previous company went "full serverless" on new development, and delivered amazing performance at very low cost. My general opinion has flipped after that experience. I believe there are use cases where serverless isn't an option, but not very many.

I think most people don't realize just how "burstable" their own traffic is. If you're looking at graphs with one-hour resolution, remember that AWS bills for lambda at 1ms increment. Not sure about Azure, though.
1 comments
birdstheword5 1321 days ago
Interesting. How would you compare the developer experience between the two approaches? And what was your use case?
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pwinnski 1321 days ago
The serverless dev experience was delightful! I'd work on a single lambda, or maybe a "stack" of related lambdas, and each was focused and lean. A serverless approach is also probably-necessarily a microservices approach, which removes a lot of complication.

It was in EdTech, so we had students downloading assignments, uploading results (lambda-fronted S3 for blob storage, DynamoDB for data), administrators paging through result, grading things, students uploading images and videos of themselves, administrators reviewing them, many lambdas being triggered by changes to S3 or DynamoDB tables, or SNS messages sent from other lambdas.

I don't think most people would consider it especially bursty, except in the most general sense around midterms and finals, but in truth even a "heavy user" is only hitting APIs every so many seconds at most, and like I said, AWS lambda bills at the millisecond level.

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pranabgohain 1321 days ago
Couldn't agree more on the experience of developing on serverless. And you're quite on point, about the need for a good architect who can solve most of these issues.

I know a lot of EdTech startups who are primarily serverless at massive scale.

Along with a DevOps team, an Observability tool like KloudMate will go a long way in managing serverless stacks.

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pwinnski 1321 days ago
I will say, if you don't have a great architect at the top level, and support from DevOps, you end up with miserable experiences like the negative stuff I see here.

Well, some of it seems to be assumptions, but I believe the negative experiences, I just think they lacked a great architect.

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