3 ms·

Honest question. What are the advantages of Serverless over PaaS.

andyfleming 9y ago
It depends if the PaaS is auto-scaling. One of the ideas of serverless is that you are only running infrastructure based on exact demand. Theoretically, you might be over-provisioning PaaS resources to handle scaling.
adventured 9y ago
It's the elimination of idle resources that you're otherwise paying for. It can reduce a section of your DevOps costs as well. As with most things though, if you push on this, then that happens over there. Some of your cost savings via serverless, will potentially get you elsewhere over time (increased complexity = typically the people handling that complexity will cost you more; if this becomes a much bigger trend and grows further in complexity, you can bet the bargaining power of the people handling that complexity will go up accordingly).
viraptor 9y ago
Others mentioned things related to cost, but for me the best thing is the simplification of the design. Usually you have to decide many things up front - is something asynchronous, is it queued, is it behind a specific API, etc. Once you start using lambda, many of those questions get much simpler - that thing you're thinking of now is just another lambda function. You can change many details later. Even better - you can move functionality between subprojects without reintegrating code most of the time - lambda design guarantees you have completely isolated self-contained units of functionality. It does not solve all the issues. And you can potentially split the problem into too many tiny parts, but the "just make it another function" approach worked for me as a rule of the thumb.
erikb 9y ago
It is PaaS, but with a little less actual getting-dirty-tooling and a little more life-can-be-so-simple marketing. Are you a manager or an engineer who tries to gain public attention? Then use Serverless. The marketing is so good, you'll win in every meeting. Are you the engineer who actually fixes the problems? Stay as far away from marketing-heavy solutions as you can. What you actually want in this case are tools that let you look inside, open up all the complexity to you, and therefore help you debug and learn the current context. In that case other PaaS solutions are preferable.

It depends if the PaaS is auto-scaling. One of the ideas of serverless is that you are only running infrastructure based on exact demand. Theoretically, you might be over-provisioning PaaS resources to handle scaling.

adventured 9y ago

It's the elimination of idle resources that you're otherwise paying for. It can reduce a section of your DevOps costs as well. As with most things though, if you push on this, then that happens over there. Some of your cost savings via serverless, will potentially get you elsewhere over time (increased complexity = typically the people handling that complexity will cost you more; if this becomes a much bigger trend and grows further in complexity, you can bet the bargaining power of the people handling that complexity will go up accordingly).

viraptor 9y ago

Others mentioned things related to cost, but for me the best thing is the simplification of the design. Usually you have to decide many things up front - is something asynchronous, is it queued, is it behind a specific API, etc. Once you start using lambda, many of those questions get much simpler - that thing you're thinking of now is just another lambda function. You can change many details later. Even better - you can move functionality between subprojects without reintegrating code most of the time - lambda design guarantees you have completely isolated self-contained units of functionality. It does not solve all the issues. And you can potentially split the problem into too many tiny parts, but the "just make it another function" approach worked for me as a rule of the thumb.

erikb 9y ago

It is PaaS, but with a little less actual getting-dirty-tooling and a little more life-can-be-so-simple marketing. Are you a manager or an engineer who tries to gain public attention? Then use Serverless. The marketing is so good, you'll win in every meeting. Are you the engineer who actually fixes the problems? Stay as far away from marketing-heavy solutions as you can. What you actually want in this case are tools that let you look inside, open up all the complexity to you, and therefore help you debug and learn the current context. In that case other PaaS solutions are preferable.