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I am a believer in "Serverless" and that it will play a primary role in a large portion of developers' lives... in the future My experience with servless is th

I am a believer in "Serverless" and that it will play a primary role in a large portion of developers' lives... in the future My experience with servless is that while this may be true at a certain level: > No server management I feel like in Amazon's current toolset, you are MORE aware of "servers" than you ever have been before. It's just abstracted into a different layer (cloudformations, etc). The boilerplate for severless projects it's a complete mess, imo. Besides that, the Develop/Test/Deploy/Manage lifecycle is really difficult to reason about. I would hate to be the one on call when a serverless service goes down and I have to figure out what's going on! I look forward to Amazon releasing more tools (or cleaning up the ones they have) to make Serverless a breeze to work in. [EDIT] clarification of a couple minor things

keithwhor 9y ago
That future is being created, you're probably just less aware of it than you think. Serverlessconf just announced their NYC conference, expected to be the largest yet. If Austin is any indicator, it will be huge. [1] Tim Wagner at AWS likes to spout the stat that billions of financial trades are already being processed per day on AWS Lambda. The "serverless" market is gigantic and growing rapidly. And then there's companies like StdLib [2], where we've built an abstraction layer on top of serverless architecture that turns remote procedure calls (and APIs) into first-class citizens of your development environment with a single package and allows you to ship applications without ever worrying about infrastructure. We just closed a $2M seed [3] and are announcing some transformative partnerships shortly. We're tackling some of the exact issues you have problems with, and we're not the only ones. The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. ;) Disclaimer: I am the founder of StdLib. :) [1] https://nyc.serverlessconf.io/ https://nyc.serverlessconf.io/ [2] https://github.com/stdlib/lib/ https://github.com/stdlib/lib/ [3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/stdlib-just-raised-2-million-to-connect-businesses-via-apis/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/stdlib-just-raised-2-milli...
- EGreg 9y ago
  Why are posts like this being downvoted? Is t because it contains self promotional links? I think the post is informative and adds value. dang, I think there should be a feature to add an optional anonymous and private comment to the person when you downvote something, to let them know why (but with no arguments).
  - keithwhor 9y ago
    As developers we're allergic to marketing. Well, most of it. So when I make comments like this every once in a while I anticipate a bit of blowback. This is also a really competitive space with a lot of new players that check HN frequently - so keep that in mind. I can tell you it's pretty difficult as a founder to draw the line around self-promotion; on one hand, you don't want to be an ass, and on the other, you're genuinely excited and passionate about the future you're helping to create and have personally poured your blood and sweat into for thousands of hours. I hope that "real recognizes real" at some point in the communication chain and we're able to maintain that with our developers. I appreciate your post here, definitely.
    - fpgaminer 9y ago
      I don't know about other readers here, but personally I would _encourage_ self promotion. This is a YCombinator site after all. As long as it remains on topic (which your comment most certainly was).
- xahrepap 9y ago
  Oh, I know it exists, and I know tons of people are using it. But like I said, I don't think that the tooling is there right now for mass migration (or anything like it). It's really difficult to test/debug. It's difficult to dianose issues. It's difficult to even set up a "Hello World" API Gateway that uses lambdas. It's painful... as are all new technoligies. I guess what I mean to say is: I look forward when I just jump on AWS and start using it for a production app, and the boilerplate and amount of config files I have to maintain drops. I'm also aware of the tool called "serverless" ( https://serverless.com/ https://serverless.com/ ) which is also a step in the right direction.
  - adjohn 9y ago
    Not trying to be spammy here, but I want there to be awareness that there are startups working on tools to address these gaps. Our startup, IOpipe[1] is working on one set of tools to ease development, debugging, and instrumentation for serverless applications. Aside from Stdlib and ourselves, there are others working in areas like security and CI/CD as well. These are early days, and tools will soon become abundant, but at least there are a handful to try out today. [1] - https://iopipe.com https://iopipe.com
  - boundlessdreamz 9y ago
    Never tried AWS Lambda but Google Cloud Functions was trivial to setup for HTTP triggers.
l5870uoo9y 9y ago
I think the ease at which a VPS is configured (and scaled) is underrated. I mean you can literally install your tech stack with a few commands that you can copy-paste into the terminal and upgrade it with a few clicks. Plus working with a command line just seems more "right" than clicking around in AWS backend.

keithwhor 9y ago

That future is being created, you're probably just less aware of it than you think. Serverlessconf just announced their NYC conference, expected to be the largest yet. If Austin is any indicator, it will be huge. [1] Tim Wagner at AWS likes to spout the stat that billions of financial trades are already being processed per day on AWS Lambda. The "serverless" market is gigantic and growing rapidly. And then there's companies like StdLib [2], where we've built an abstraction layer on top of serverless architecture that turns remote procedure calls (and APIs) into first-class citizens of your development environment with a single package and allows you to ship applications without ever worrying about infrastructure. We just closed a $2M seed [3] and are announcing some transformative partnerships shortly. We're tackling some of the exact issues you have problems with, and we're not the only ones. The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. ;) Disclaimer: I am the founder of StdLib. :) [1] https://nyc.serverlessconf.io/ https://nyc.serverlessconf.io/ [2] https://github.com/stdlib/lib/ https://github.com/stdlib/lib/ [3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/stdlib-just-raised-2-million-to-connect-businesses-via-apis/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/stdlib-just-raised-2-milli...

EGreg 9y ago
Why are posts like this being downvoted? Is t because it contains self promotional links? I think the post is informative and adds value. dang, I think there should be a feature to add an optional anonymous and private comment to the person when you downvote something, to let them know why (but with no arguments).
- keithwhor 9y ago
  As developers we're allergic to marketing. Well, most of it. So when I make comments like this every once in a while I anticipate a bit of blowback. This is also a really competitive space with a lot of new players that check HN frequently - so keep that in mind. I can tell you it's pretty difficult as a founder to draw the line around self-promotion; on one hand, you don't want to be an ass, and on the other, you're genuinely excited and passionate about the future you're helping to create and have personally poured your blood and sweat into for thousands of hours. I hope that "real recognizes real" at some point in the communication chain and we're able to maintain that with our developers. I appreciate your post here, definitely.
  - fpgaminer 9y ago
    I don't know about other readers here, but personally I would _encourage_ self promotion. This is a YCombinator site after all. As long as it remains on topic (which your comment most certainly was).
xahrepap 9y ago
Oh, I know it exists, and I know tons of people are using it. But like I said, I don't think that the tooling is there right now for mass migration (or anything like it). It's really difficult to test/debug. It's difficult to dianose issues. It's difficult to even set up a "Hello World" API Gateway that uses lambdas. It's painful... as are all new technoligies. I guess what I mean to say is: I look forward when I just jump on AWS and start using it for a production app, and the boilerplate and amount of config files I have to maintain drops. I'm also aware of the tool called "serverless" ( https://serverless.com/ https://serverless.com/ ) which is also a step in the right direction.
- adjohn 9y ago
  Not trying to be spammy here, but I want there to be awareness that there are startups working on tools to address these gaps. Our startup, IOpipe[1] is working on one set of tools to ease development, debugging, and instrumentation for serverless applications. Aside from Stdlib and ourselves, there are others working in areas like security and CI/CD as well. These are early days, and tools will soon become abundant, but at least there are a handful to try out today. [1] - https://iopipe.com https://iopipe.com
- boundlessdreamz 9y ago
  Never tried AWS Lambda but Google Cloud Functions was trivial to setup for HTTP triggers.

l5870uoo9y 9y ago

I think the ease at which a VPS is configured (and scaled) is underrated. I mean you can literally install your tech stack with a few commands that you can copy-paste into the terminal and upgrade it with a few clicks. Plus working with a command line just seems more "right" than clicking around in AWS backend.