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Here are my opinions from working with both over the last year: Serverless is brand new, and has all the burrs of a freshly cut service. Expect sharp corners,

Here are my opinions from working with both over the last year: Serverless is brand new, and has all the burrs of a freshly cut service. Expect sharp corners, like bizarre documentation and lack of examples. I think it goes without saying that tooling and Best Practices are still immature. In my work (Lambdas) I've found they do well when organizing small pieces of work and event driven systems. They really do talk with all of AWS and event triggers are popping up all over their infrastructure. For me, Serverless is more about "not writing server boilerplate/provisioning" than "not having servers". The largest hurdle conceptually has been hoisting tangential concerns from the application into the infrastructure primitives. Here are some examples in my current work: * The API Gateway does routing, some payload modification for headers, as well as authentication and authorization. * I'm also relying more on security groups and specialized IAM roles instead of application specific authorization code. This leaves me with only the application specific code to be called. * Lambdas communicate with each other through SNS (and only when authorized via IAM). * All of my application code (currently) exists as Lambdas. This comes at a cost of infrastructure complexity and a learning curve. I'm also not using several services that AWS provides just to keep my cognitive load from exploding. Serverless Overall: Like exploring the jungles of Africa! Lots of really cool ideas and deployments, but here be lions! Containers are on the march of maturation. For me, the most useful part of Docker is decoupling the local application needs with the deployment environment. I exploit that decoupling to make sterile local development environments with Docker/Compose. The recent Docker OSX/Windows support smooths out the last few bumps in my dev workflow. The deployment, however, is still maturing. To be fair, it's mostly a distributed computation problem and not unique to Docker. Kubernetes is a bear, but an improving one. Same with E2C from what I've heard from friends. On a smaller scale, it significantly opens up the playing field for less popular languages/tools. Heroku's Docker support, for example, allows for any language to be deployed as long as it accepts the Docker contract. Docker Overall: a) Local is AWESOME! b) Deployment is the Wild West. Still largely unsettled but the Oregon Trail is OPEN!

collyw 10y ago
What are you building that needs to be split up in such a way? And how many people access the system?
- JamesLeonis 10y ago
  > What are you building that needs to be split up in such a way? "Need" is such a fickle word... I'm using the Lambdas to build an event sourced system on top of microservices. Because I can hoist so much infrastructure from each service, it makes each service significantly easier to write and manage. This allows the application specific code to change without rewriting the routing/auth(z)/provisioning code along the way. I can even rip out whole services and the others are blissfully unaware. Because Lambdas are only charged when invoked, it keeps the costs down. RDS is my biggest expense by far, but I'm under a Standard 1X Heroku instance. If you have a service that isn't used much, Lambda's can bring your costs to near-zero. An added benefit is I can be fairly liberal with deployed lambdas because I'm not thinking about machine/hour costs. Multiple staging environments? SURE! After a little while in the Lambda world, I started to see them as little lightweight workers. They can be told to listen to nearly anything under the AWS umbrella, and AWS is _chatty_. Pair it up with the API gateway and you can build 3rd party integrations. Before I had to set up a TON of infrastructure to have these abilities. It's pretty liberating. Finally, I feel like the ideas in Serverless are both interesting and not well explored. I hope to share what I've found with others as we chart this new territory. > And how many people access the system? I'm not sure about what you mean by people. Users? Developers? I'll answer both. For now I'm the only developer, but I expect that to change within a year. The local Docker powered dev environment keeps me sane with a simple `docker-compose up -d` to bring it up. The infrastructure hoisting significantly reduces the service's LOC, making them easier to grok. Isolated development environments and very light mocking ease local development and testing. I do pay a penalty when doing integration tests locally, however, but I'm punting that into my staging environment for the moment. I have some pre-alpha users that are helping me shape the product. I admit at first glance it looks foolish/overkill/wat for my user size. Before Lambda, this architecture _would_ be too complex, and pricing would be prohibitively expensive, for the size of the product as it exists. That's what Lambda (and Serverless in my mind) brings to the table. It leans on Cloud Infrastructure and it's charge-by-use model to bring architectures like microservices to the hobbyist and small businesses. As the tooling and docs improve, I expect it to further blur the lines in "DevOps". Could you tell I'm a little excited by Serverless/Lambdas?

collyw 10y ago

What are you building that needs to be split up in such a way? And how many people access the system?

JamesLeonis 10y ago
> What are you building that needs to be split up in such a way? "Need" is such a fickle word... I'm using the Lambdas to build an event sourced system on top of microservices. Because I can hoist so much infrastructure from each service, it makes each service significantly easier to write and manage. This allows the application specific code to change without rewriting the routing/auth(z)/provisioning code along the way. I can even rip out whole services and the others are blissfully unaware. Because Lambdas are only charged when invoked, it keeps the costs down. RDS is my biggest expense by far, but I'm under a Standard 1X Heroku instance. If you have a service that isn't used much, Lambda's can bring your costs to near-zero. An added benefit is I can be fairly liberal with deployed lambdas because I'm not thinking about machine/hour costs. Multiple staging environments? SURE! After a little while in the Lambda world, I started to see them as little lightweight workers. They can be told to listen to nearly anything under the AWS umbrella, and AWS is _chatty_. Pair it up with the API gateway and you can build 3rd party integrations. Before I had to set up a TON of infrastructure to have these abilities. It's pretty liberating. Finally, I feel like the ideas in Serverless are both interesting and not well explored. I hope to share what I've found with others as we chart this new territory. > And how many people access the system? I'm not sure about what you mean by people. Users? Developers? I'll answer both. For now I'm the only developer, but I expect that to change within a year. The local Docker powered dev environment keeps me sane with a simple `docker-compose up -d` to bring it up. The infrastructure hoisting significantly reduces the service's LOC, making them easier to grok. Isolated development environments and very light mocking ease local development and testing. I do pay a penalty when doing integration tests locally, however, but I'm punting that into my staging environment for the moment. I have some pre-alpha users that are helping me shape the product. I admit at first glance it looks foolish/overkill/wat for my user size. Before Lambda, this architecture _would_ be too complex, and pricing would be prohibitively expensive, for the size of the product as it exists. That's what Lambda (and Serverless in my mind) brings to the table. It leans on Cloud Infrastructure and it's charge-by-use model to bring architectures like microservices to the hobbyist and small businesses. As the tooling and docs improve, I expect it to further blur the lines in "DevOps". Could you tell I'm a little excited by Serverless/Lambdas?