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So basically you cut a need for in-house sysadmin? The way you are explaining it sounds ok when you have very small team. And if you look at comments below the

So basically you cut a need for in-house sysadmin? The way you are explaining it sounds ok when you have very small team. And if you look at comments below they seem to have an issue of how to do warmup and cold function calls which suggest that you have to know what the platform is doing anyway (has JIT warmed up, do we need to replicate warmed up functions, how do we cold execute fast etc). So to sum up, it is serverless as long as a 3rd party is in charge of the actual servers and auto-scale infra and if we do it in house it is normal server farm? And sorry if i sound "edgy" but I am just trying to stretch the meaning of actual word "serverless" in my brain to what is being talked about here. I am not a native speaker so that might hinder me as well.

aidos 9y ago
As ever, looking at some extreme examples can be instructive. Imagine you have no infrastructure at all, and there's only a single function you need to run. In my case, I have a function that takes a file and produces a file and can take 5 minutes to an hour to run. The warm up time doesn't matter then. If I could just write one big old python function to do all the work and then push it to someone else so I can run as many instances of that function as required then that's a very different mental model from dealing with all the setup required to host that function myself. There are other tasks too, where you just have some one off admin function (maybe some monitoring thing) where it's a pain to build all the infrastructure around it just to run it. You're right though, it really doesn't matter what you use - you have to understand what's going on. For reference, I don't use any serverless stuff in my stack — though I can see where the uses lie and could definitely imagine building for what they offer in some cases. It's a useful tool to have available, but not the only one you should reach for. One of the best environments I ever used was PiCloud. We used to farm out our long running functions to them. Within your code you could say something like, run_fn_on_picloud(fn, args) and they would ship your code into their environment and execute it. It was absolutely wonderful and you could just fan out as much as required.

aidos 9y ago

As ever, looking at some extreme examples can be instructive. Imagine you have no infrastructure at all, and there's only a single function you need to run. In my case, I have a function that takes a file and produces a file and can take 5 minutes to an hour to run. The warm up time doesn't matter then. If I could just write one big old python function to do all the work and then push it to someone else so I can run as many instances of that function as required then that's a very different mental model from dealing with all the setup required to host that function myself. There are other tasks too, where you just have some one off admin function (maybe some monitoring thing) where it's a pain to build all the infrastructure around it just to run it. You're right though, it really doesn't matter what you use - you have to understand what's going on. For reference, I don't use any serverless stuff in my stack — though I can see where the uses lie and could definitely imagine building for what they offer in some cases. It's a useful tool to have available, but not the only one you should reach for. One of the best environments I ever used was PiCloud. We used to farm out our long running functions to them. Within your code you could say something like, run_fn_on_picloud(fn, args) and they would ship your code into their environment and execute it. It was absolutely wonderful and you could just fan out as much as required.