[kburman]

What's valuable about rediscovering that stateless architectures requiring network round-trips for state access are slower than in-memory state? This isn't new information, it's a predictable consequence of their architecture choice that anyone with distributed systems experience could have told them on day zero.

[chronark_]

Not everyone is born with experience in distributed systems

[sgarland]

Sure, but there are some fundamentals about latency that any programmer should know [0] (absolute values outdated, but still useful as relative comparisons), like “network calls are multiple orders of magnitude slower than IPC.”

I’m assuming you’re an employee of the company based on your comments, so please don’t take this poorly - I applaud any and all public efforts to bring back sanity to modern architecture, especially with objective metrics.

0: https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375

[chronark_]

I cofounded it yeah

And yeah you’re right in hindsight it was a terrible idea to begin with

I thought it could work but didn’t benchmark it enough and didn’t plan enough. It all looked great in early POCs and all of these issues cropped up as we built it

[kburman]

That's fair, but then the framing matters. The article criticizes serverless architecture rather than acknowledging an evaluation failure.

"Serverless was fighting us" vs "We didn't understand serverless tradeoffs" - one is a learning experience, the other is misdirected criticism.

[chronark_]

Yeah that’s fair

[lossolo]

You don't need experience and there is not really a lot to know about "distributed systems" in this case, that's basic CS knowledge about networks, latency and what "serverless" actually is, you can read about it. To be honest, to me it reads like people who don't understand the problem they're solving, haven't acquired the necessary knowledge to solve it (either by learning themselves or by asking/hiring people who have it), and seeing such an amateurish mistake doesn't inspire confidence for the future. You should either hire people that know what they are doing or upgrade your knowledge about systems you are using before making decisions to use them.

[nougati]

Sometimes I see a post about sorting algorithms online. Some people seem to benefit from reading about these things, but often, I find there isn't much new information for me. That's OK, because I know somebody somewhere benefits from knowing this.

It is your decision to make this a circlejerk of musings about how the company must be run by amateurs. Whatever crusade you're fighting in vividly criticising them is not valuable at all. People need to learn and share so we can all improve, stop distracting from that point.

[bcrosby95]

Uh, no, 95% of our architectures are stateless and its fine because RTT isn't dogshit, unlike AWS lambda.