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I like that we're seeing more nuanced evaluations of serverless than the previous hype, but totally agree that there's certain use-cases where serverless shines

I like that we're seeing more nuanced evaluations of serverless than the previous hype, but totally agree that there's certain use-cases where serverless shines and cold-start seems negligible in practice. For example, on the real-time side, busy APIs with functions than execute quickly. If the caller has either a decent timeout + retry configured (or doesn't care), cold start really isn't an issue. User facing web technologies? Serverless has never been that compelling for that given auto-scaling webservers is a pretty solid technique. But truth be told, not having to deal with servers at all is magical. And if your team is used to it, it does cut down on a lot of worry such as patching stuff. Spectre or Meltdown patches? Ha, zero effort for us.

mmt 8y ago
> But truth be told, not having to deal with servers at all is magical. And if your team is used to it, it does cut down on a lot of worry such as patching stuff. Spectre or Meltdown patches? Ha, zero effort for us. The problem with this (which applies to "cloud" infrastructure) is that, ultimately, it's somebody else's server. You may not "worry" about something like low-level security patches, but that also means you have no control or even visibility into them. It doesn't mean you're not subject to the consequences. Of course, there's always something magical about any form of outsourcing when it works realy well. I'm not sure this form has enough of a track record to be blindly trusted, however.