4 ms·

Any time I read "serverless", I get a violent allergic reaction. There is no such thing, as software requires hardware to run on, and the person or persons who

Any time I read "serverless", I get a violent allergic reaction. There is no such thing, as software requires hardware to run on, and the person or persons who went "serverless" simply chose to stick their head(s) in the sand and punt the OS engineering and hardware design and maintenance off to someone else, hoping that it will just work. But it does not, and eventually there will be an outage and lost money. One can punt this responsibility off to someone else, but there will be consequences. If you want reliable infrastructure, first you must become a master system, database and network administrator, then you must apprentice with a mentor to become a system engineer, and finally after several decades of practitioning as one, you will have enough experience and insight to become a system architect. There is no way around that, no punting will help.

scarface74 8y ago
Any time I read "serverless", I get a violent allergic reaction. There is no such thing, as software requires hardware to run on, The meanings of words morph over time. When developers mention serverless everyone knows what it means it that context. Just like when someone says there is a bug in their code no one thinks that there are roaches running around in their computer. and the person or persons who went "serverless" simply chose to stick their head(s) in the sand and punt the OS engineering and hardware design and maintenance off to someone else, When I write a program, I'm not writing assembly language. I'm also "sticking my head in the sand" about the how assembly works. AWS has a whole team of people that know how to do that stuff. hoping that it will just work. But it does not, and eventually there will be an outage and lost money. One can punt this responsibility off to someone else, but there will be consequences. AWS is probably more reliable than what you could do on prem or at a colo, If you want reliable infrastructure, first you must become a master system, database and network administrator, then you must apprentice with a mentor to become a system engineer, and finally after several decades of practitioning as one, you will have enough experience and insight to become a system architect. There is no way around that, no punting will help. Tell that to Netflix. They host everything on AWS. They purposefully moved from an on prem architecture to AWS because they realized where their core competence was.
- Annatar 8y ago
  Netflix has an army of professional system and kernel engineers who optimize and engineer the OSes they run on; they just use AWS for virtual machine and datacenter capacity.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    They use a lot of AWS services - not just virtual machines - First they use Ubuntu Linux - SES (Email) - ElasticSearch (AWS has their own managed version) - SQS (queueing system) - S3 (storage) -auto scaling Most of the optimization's they do are standard things at scale where they are tuning by measuring performance. https://youtu.be/89fYOo1V2pA https://youtu.be/89fYOo1V2pA and the slide deck from the presentation. https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/how-netflix-tunes-ec2-instances-for-performance https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/how-netflix-tunes-ec... But that's even more of a reason to choose AWS, Netflix has open sourced dozens of tools specifically related to AWS. You get to take advantage of their tools and knowledge.
    - Annatar 8y ago
      So if anything, they are not running “serverless”, far from it: they really dig their hands into the OS and system engineering. Just recently they did kernel engineering on FreeBSD to push the networking as close to 100 Gbps per interface as possible. You picked a bad example to make your point, a point which I do not, from experience of doing this for several decades, recognize as valid anyway. By the by, I’m that guy who runs a private datacenter in the basement, from designing one’s own rack mountable servers to crimping the network cables and running the fiber. Infrastructure is not something one should entrust to others, because these others cannot be trusted, as has been proven by AWS outages time and time again. And yes, I system engineer my own operating system as well. Well I did, it’s all been running automatically for years now.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        You were making a point about people should run their own data centers. Netflix is not running their own data centers. Can you run your own data center in 90 areas around the world? Can you run your own globally distributed CDN? Your own globally distributed DNS? Are you saying that you never had any downtime? Can you stand up a replica of your object store, your caching and your database in both Europe and Asia so it can be closer to your outsourced developers and foreign customers? Does your data center in your basement allow me to set up subnets that span regions (not AWS “regions”, geographic areas - “Availability Zones”) just in case your basement floods? What if I don't want a replica of data, what if I want to duplicate my entire infrastructure in Asia so the developers there can have a clone of our infrastructure - databases, storage, VMs, load balancers, multiple availability zones, etc. How long would it take you to do that? I could do it with a JSON script and run a command. How fast can you provision a half dozen load balancers and five or ten dedicated computers - not VMs “dedicated hosts”? I can do it by creating a JSON file and running one command from my terminal. And why should I trust you to set up a more reliable, redundant, network than AWS? Again Netflix didn’t trust themselves to create more reliable infrastructure and decided to trust a competitor to do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and the guy who lead the transition is now a VP at AWS, so I think he knows something about infrastructure.
rockostrich 8y ago
The term "serverless" means you don't need to manage the server resources. There is an "infinite" on-demand amount of resources that are available at request and they are available to run any process you want with a single command/hook/etc. It's a misnomer, but it's no worse than "the cloud" or how "artificial intelligence" has come to mean anything to do with machine learning.
- Annatar 8y ago
  There is no such thing as infinite server resources.
jedimastert 8y ago
>punt the OS engineering and hardware design and maintenance off to someone else Isn't hiring other people who know better than you to do this kind of stuff kind of the point? Like, a lot of people's jobs are based on that idea, including almost everyone in the IT industry. I'm confused by your point. It almost looks like sarcasm. Getting some serious "Poe's Law" here.
- Annatar 8y ago
  One cannot design and write high quality software without throughly understanding the substrate underneath and how to engineer for it; from doing this for over 30 years, I’m telling you it’s impossible.
jessaustin 8y ago
Any time I read "serverless", I get a violent allergic reaction. You're even, then, because I've got the allergy to this trivial monotonous whinging about the by-now-well-understood meaning of the term "serverless". I'm not the only one.

scarface74 8y ago

Any time I read "serverless", I get a violent allergic reaction. There is no such thing, as software requires hardware to run on, The meanings of words morph over time. When developers mention serverless everyone knows what it means it that context. Just like when someone says there is a bug in their code no one thinks that there are roaches running around in their computer. and the person or persons who went "serverless" simply chose to stick their head(s) in the sand and punt the OS engineering and hardware design and maintenance off to someone else, When I write a program, I'm not writing assembly language. I'm also "sticking my head in the sand" about the how assembly works. AWS has a whole team of people that know how to do that stuff. hoping that it will just work. But it does not, and eventually there will be an outage and lost money. One can punt this responsibility off to someone else, but there will be consequences. AWS is probably more reliable than what you could do on prem or at a colo, If you want reliable infrastructure, first you must become a master system, database and network administrator, then you must apprentice with a mentor to become a system engineer, and finally after several decades of practitioning as one, you will have enough experience and insight to become a system architect. There is no way around that, no punting will help. Tell that to Netflix. They host everything on AWS. They purposefully moved from an on prem architecture to AWS because they realized where their core competence was.

Annatar 8y ago
Netflix has an army of professional system and kernel engineers who optimize and engineer the OSes they run on; they just use AWS for virtual machine and datacenter capacity.
- scarface74 8y ago
  They use a lot of AWS services - not just virtual machines - First they use Ubuntu Linux - SES (Email) - ElasticSearch (AWS has their own managed version) - SQS (queueing system) - S3 (storage) -auto scaling Most of the optimization's they do are standard things at scale where they are tuning by measuring performance. https://youtu.be/89fYOo1V2pA https://youtu.be/89fYOo1V2pA and the slide deck from the presentation. https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/how-netflix-tunes-ec2-instances-for-performance https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/how-netflix-tunes-ec... But that's even more of a reason to choose AWS, Netflix has open sourced dozens of tools specifically related to AWS. You get to take advantage of their tools and knowledge.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    So if anything, they are not running “serverless”, far from it: they really dig their hands into the OS and system engineering. Just recently they did kernel engineering on FreeBSD to push the networking as close to 100 Gbps per interface as possible. You picked a bad example to make your point, a point which I do not, from experience of doing this for several decades, recognize as valid anyway. By the by, I’m that guy who runs a private datacenter in the basement, from designing one’s own rack mountable servers to crimping the network cables and running the fiber. Infrastructure is not something one should entrust to others, because these others cannot be trusted, as has been proven by AWS outages time and time again. And yes, I system engineer my own operating system as well. Well I did, it’s all been running automatically for years now.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      You were making a point about people should run their own data centers. Netflix is not running their own data centers. Can you run your own data center in 90 areas around the world? Can you run your own globally distributed CDN? Your own globally distributed DNS? Are you saying that you never had any downtime? Can you stand up a replica of your object store, your caching and your database in both Europe and Asia so it can be closer to your outsourced developers and foreign customers? Does your data center in your basement allow me to set up subnets that span regions (not AWS “regions”, geographic areas - “Availability Zones”) just in case your basement floods? What if I don't want a replica of data, what if I want to duplicate my entire infrastructure in Asia so the developers there can have a clone of our infrastructure - databases, storage, VMs, load balancers, multiple availability zones, etc. How long would it take you to do that? I could do it with a JSON script and run a command. How fast can you provision a half dozen load balancers and five or ten dedicated computers - not VMs “dedicated hosts”? I can do it by creating a JSON file and running one command from my terminal. And why should I trust you to set up a more reliable, redundant, network than AWS? Again Netflix didn’t trust themselves to create more reliable infrastructure and decided to trust a competitor to do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” and the guy who lead the transition is now a VP at AWS, so I think he knows something about infrastructure.

rockostrich 8y ago

The term "serverless" means you don't need to manage the server resources. There is an "infinite" on-demand amount of resources that are available at request and they are available to run any process you want with a single command/hook/etc. It's a misnomer, but it's no worse than "the cloud" or how "artificial intelligence" has come to mean anything to do with machine learning.

Annatar 8y ago
There is no such thing as infinite server resources.

jedimastert 8y ago

>punt the OS engineering and hardware design and maintenance off to someone else Isn't hiring other people who know better than you to do this kind of stuff kind of the point? Like, a lot of people's jobs are based on that idea, including almost everyone in the IT industry. I'm confused by your point. It almost looks like sarcasm. Getting some serious "Poe's Law" here.

Annatar 8y ago
One cannot design and write high quality software without throughly understanding the substrate underneath and how to engineer for it; from doing this for over 30 years, I’m telling you it’s impossible.

jessaustin 8y ago

Any time I read "serverless", I get a violent allergic reaction. You're even, then, because I've got the allergy to this trivial monotonous whinging about the by-now-well-understood meaning of the term "serverless". I'm not the only one.