3 ms·

One thing I would like to see in articles like this are more concrete use cases for using serverless. The article begins talking about the concept as though yo

One thing I would like to see in articles like this are more concrete use cases for using serverless. The article begins talking about the concept as though you should write your entire app in serverless, and then in their case study, use serverless as a background process to convert image types. The other use case I always come across is image scaling. I'd be interested if anyone would like to share their use cases as entire apps or background processes.

laurentl 9y ago
Well, I'll add my own use of serverless. We use Lambda + API GW to manage the glue between our different data/service providers. So for instance we expose a "services" API (API GW) that takes a request, does some business logic (lambda code), calls the relevant provider(s) and returns the aggregate response. That principle can (and probably will) be extended to hosting our own back-end / business logic. We're trying to get to the point where a dev only needs to write a Swagger file, the lambda code and a bit of configuration, and the rest is taken care of by AWS and our CI framework.
- fuball63 9y ago
  Very cool, thanks for sharing. The last part about just writing Swagger, Lambda, and a little config is very interesting. Do you worry about vendor lock in, which is coming up a lot on this comment section?
  - laurentl 9y ago
    we're a small start-up, so I worry about shipping as fluidly as possible, and being confident that my infra just runs (security, patch management, scalability, uptime, etc.) All of which serverless gives me much more easily, and at a lower cost (for now) than running my own EC2 instances. I'll worry about vendor lock-in (or dumping serverless for that matter) once I start to get ridiculous bills from AWS, or hit performance issues, or whatnot. But I try to mitigate by relying on standard formats (Swagger) and keeping my code as close to the business logic as possible - which is fairly easy with Lambda. The only thing that is really tied to AWS is the framework we use to build and deploy the architecture: a large Cloudformation file basically. We explored Serverless (the app) to manage this, but it didn't fit our need (in particular, Serverless has apparently never heard about Swagger, so that sucks).

laurentl 9y ago

Well, I'll add my own use of serverless. We use Lambda + API GW to manage the glue between our different data/service providers. So for instance we expose a "services" API (API GW) that takes a request, does some business logic (lambda code), calls the relevant provider(s) and returns the aggregate response. That principle can (and probably will) be extended to hosting our own back-end / business logic. We're trying to get to the point where a dev only needs to write a Swagger file, the lambda code and a bit of configuration, and the rest is taken care of by AWS and our CI framework.

fuball63 9y ago
Very cool, thanks for sharing. The last part about just writing Swagger, Lambda, and a little config is very interesting. Do you worry about vendor lock in, which is coming up a lot on this comment section?
- laurentl 9y ago
  we're a small start-up, so I worry about shipping as fluidly as possible, and being confident that my infra just runs (security, patch management, scalability, uptime, etc.) All of which serverless gives me much more easily, and at a lower cost (for now) than running my own EC2 instances. I'll worry about vendor lock-in (or dumping serverless for that matter) once I start to get ridiculous bills from AWS, or hit performance issues, or whatnot. But I try to mitigate by relying on standard formats (Swagger) and keeping my code as close to the business logic as possible - which is fairly easy with Lambda. The only thing that is really tied to AWS is the framework we use to build and deploy the architecture: a large Cloudformation file basically. We explored Serverless (the app) to manage this, but it didn't fit our need (in particular, Serverless has apparently never heard about Swagger, so that sucks).