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by xylophile 866 days ago
It is literally "worth it" for companies much smaller than Meta due to the reduced infra management costs plus increased hardware utilization. A few hundred unique VMs is a boatload of work (even if you distribute it down to the dev teams), and most of those VMs will be sitting idle most of the time, just burning electricity to keep the RAM on.
1 comments
oxfordmale 866 days ago
But you would still need a boatload of a hundred unique VMS to run your serverless functions, right?

If you have a big enough SRE team to manage your serverless stack, economy of scale means that development teams utilising these can reduce their infra management costs. It is about the ratio of engineers utilising the stack compared to those that need to maintain it.

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xylophile 866 days ago
> But you would still need a boatload of a hundred unique VMS

No, you would have a boatload of generic worker VMs that could all be spun up as needed (autoscaled) from a common base image and deleted without any need to preserve state. Effectively, you're managing one VM image, which can be rolled out across your entire fleet very quickly and with zero downtime / disruption. This is even less disruption than with k8s because FAAS design is fundamentally short-lived processes, resulting in more automation (less work) for your SRE / VM team.

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oxfordmale 866 days ago
As far as I am aware there is no easy to set up open source FAAS framework. At least with Kubernetes there are a million and one tutorials, and there is a large support community.
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