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by localfirst 725 days ago
is it just me or am i seeing less and less serverless showing up in roles? seems like there was a big rush during the hype around 2021, and people went back to ec2/kubernetes
2 comments

That is because that is exactly what happened. It was tried, people went too far and tried to build entire applications in FaaS and it was largely unsuccessful. Cue a bunch of migrations onto k8s to contain costs and get back control over process lifetime, better integration with existing monitoring/tracing, etc, etc.

I am probably the farthest from a fan of serverless but I have developed some appreciation for all the tech that went into it and have found some good use-cases for serverless and serverless like things.

The one I am most bullish on is serverless at the edge. Edge compute is too expensive when provisioned the traditional way (as static reserved memory + CPU etc) and the kind of tasks you want to do at the edge (request manipulation, early AuthZ, etc) are amenable to serverless requirements/limitations. Cloudflare Workers is what I am primarily familiar with but I imagine Lambda@Edge and Fastly's solution are similar.

Is serverless dead? No. But the hype around building whole apps on Lambda and that actually being good is.

Not to mention, if your app is horizontally large, and depending on how it's configured, cold starts can really kill your overall performance.
what use cases do edge functions have? what is so critically latency sensitive
I think people realized that they had ultimately reinvented PHP and sometimes a stateful app server is just fine for your 100 req/day app.