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OK. So you connect to Postgres on RDS - cloud agnostic. You connect to S3, and: a) You can build an abstraction service if you care about vendor lock-in so mu

OK. So you connect to Postgres on RDS - cloud agnostic. You connect to S3, and: a) You can build an abstraction service if you care about vendor lock-in so much b) It has an API that plenty of open source projects are compatible with (I believe Google's storage is compatible as well) Maybe you use something like SQS or SNS. Bummer, those are gonna "lock you in". But I've personally migrated between queueing solutions before and it shouldn't be a big deal to do so. It's really easy to avoid lockin, lambda really doesn't make it any harder than EC2 at all.

scarface74 8y ago
Have you ever asked the business folks or your investors did they care about your “levels of abstraction”? What looks better on your review? I created a facade over our messaging system or I implemented this feature that brought in revenue/increased customer retention/got us closer to the upper right quadrant of Gartner’s magic square?
- staticassertion 8y ago
  I'm not sure I see your point. What is it you think I'm advocating for? My only point is that vendor lock-in is not a significant issue on AWS, and that it requires virtually no effort to avoid it.
  - tomnipotent 8y ago
    > and that it requires virtually no effort to avoid it Of course it requires effort. A lot of effort, not to mention headcount. The entire value of cloud-managed services is what it saves you vs. the trade-off's, and it's disingenuous to pretend that's not the case.
    - staticassertion 8y ago
      Sorry, I don't agree, and I feel like I provided evidence why in my first post. To summarize, choosing services like Postgres and S3 doesn't lock you in. SQS and SNS might, but I think it's an exaggerated cost, and that has nothing to do with Lambdas (EC2 instances are just as likely to use SQS or SNS - moreso, given that SQS wasn't supported for Lambdas until recently). There are tradeoffs, of course. Cost at scale is the really big one - at some point it's cheaper to bring ops/ hardware in-house. I just don't agree that lock-in is a huge issue, and I really disagree with the idea that lambdas make lock-in harder.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Well, what scale would that be? Larger than Netflix?
        late2part 8y ago
        No. At the scale of Netflix 7 years ago: https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2012/06/04/netflix-open-connect/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2012/06/04/netfl...
        scarface74 8y ago
        That’s just the CDN. Netflix is still by far AWS’s biggest customer and its compute is still on AWS. I don’t think most companies are going to be setting up colos at ISPs around the world.
        pathseeker 8y ago
        The vast majority of Netflix's traffic is video and it's video is not served by Amazon. Using a company that bypasses Amazon for 99.999% of its traffic isn't exactly an Amazon success story.
        scarface74 8y ago
        Well, what do you think Netflix is doing to be AWS’s largest customer? Have you seen any of their presentations on YouTube from AWS reinvent? Where do you think they encode the videos? Handle sign ins, etc?
        parasubvert 8y ago
        That’s an incredibly ignorant and misleading statement. It’s sort of like saying a database isn’t valuable because 99.999% of requests hit the cache, and not the disk. Everything was built on Amazon and video is largely hosted on S3. Yes, there’s a large CDN in the mix too. That doesn’t take away from the achievement.
        staticassertion 8y ago
- wisswazz 8y ago
  Why should they care, or even be in the loop for such a decision? You don’t ask your real estate agent on advice for fixing you electrical system I guess?
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Of course your business folks care whether you are spending time adding business value and helping them make money. I’ve had to explain to a CTO before why I had my team spending time on a CI/CD pipeline. Even now that I have a CTO whose idea of “writing requirements” is throwing together a Python proof of concept script and playing with Athena (writing Sql against a large CSV file stored in S3), I still better be able to articulate business value for any technological tangents I am going on.
    - wisswazz 8y ago
      Sure. Agree totally, maybe I misread your previous comment a bit. What I meant is that run-of-the-mill business folks do not necessarily know how business value is created in terms of code and architecture.
  - cthalupa 8y ago
    I don't know of any business where they wouldn't be involved. Not in the "Let's talk directly about implementation details" way, but in the "Driving product development and roadmap" and "ascertaining value to our customers" way. Any time spent on work that doesn't directly create value for customers is work that the business should be weighing in on. I'm not saying that you should never spend any time doing anything else - but these are trade offs that the product manager should be involved in, and one of their primary jobs is being able to weight the technical and business realities and figuring out where resources should be going.
- yzmtf2008 8y ago
  Both. It's why larger companies have infrastructure teams.
redisman 8y ago
As long as you write your own wrappers to the SDKs changing cloud providers is definitely doable. We started full AWS stack with Lambda but have now been slowly refactoring our way into more cloud-provider agnostic direction. It's definitely not an existential threat level lock-in. Serverless technology is only starting out still and I'm pretty sure 5 years from now Lambda won't be the go-to platform anyway. Plus honestly we've learned so much from the first big project on Lambda that writing the next one with all of that in mind will be pretty great (and agnostic).
- scarface74 8y ago
  And that goes back to developers using the repository pattern because one day the CTO might decide that they want to get rid of their 6-7 figure Oracle installation and migrate to Postgres. There is a lot more to migrating infrastructure at scale than writing a few facades. Heck, consultants get paid lots of money just to do a lift and shift and migrate a bunch of VMWare images from on prem to AWS.
- staticassertion 8y ago
  I don't believe that writing wrappers is particularly important, though I think that anyone who uses SQS is likely to build an abstraction over it at some point (as with all lower level communication protocols, at some point you build a "client library" that's more specific). As I said, at least in the cases of your database and your storage, being cloud-agnostic is trivial. Managed postgres is easy to migrate from, S3 shouldn't be hard to migrate from either. Certainly lambda doesn't impact this too much. > Serverless technology is only starting out still and I'm pretty sure 5 years from now Lambda won't be the go-to platform anyway. Plus honestly we've learned so much from the first big project on Lambda that writing the next one with all of that in mind will be pretty great (and agnostic). I realize it isn't entirely on-topic, but could you elaborate? I'm curious to hear more about your opinion on this, I'm not sure what the future of Serverless is.
cs02rm0 8y ago
a) You can build an abstraction service if you care about vendor lock-in so much ... It's really easy to avoid lockin, lambda really doesn't make it any harder than EC2 at all. Yes, you can build an abstraction layer. And maintain it. And hope that you don't get feature divergence underneath it. That's really, really expensive.
- staticassertion 8y ago
  I don't see how you could have missed (b).
  - cs02rm0 8y ago
    I don't see why you think I have.

scarface74 8y ago

Have you ever asked the business folks or your investors did they care about your “levels of abstraction”? What looks better on your review? I created a facade over our messaging system or I implemented this feature that brought in revenue/increased customer retention/got us closer to the upper right quadrant of Gartner’s magic square?

staticassertion 8y ago
I'm not sure I see your point. What is it you think I'm advocating for? My only point is that vendor lock-in is not a significant issue on AWS, and that it requires virtually no effort to avoid it.
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  > and that it requires virtually no effort to avoid it Of course it requires effort. A lot of effort, not to mention headcount. The entire value of cloud-managed services is what it saves you vs. the trade-off's, and it's disingenuous to pretend that's not the case.
  - staticassertion 8y ago
    Sorry, I don't agree, and I feel like I provided evidence why in my first post. To summarize, choosing services like Postgres and S3 doesn't lock you in. SQS and SNS might, but I think it's an exaggerated cost, and that has nothing to do with Lambdas (EC2 instances are just as likely to use SQS or SNS - moreso, given that SQS wasn't supported for Lambdas until recently). There are tradeoffs, of course. Cost at scale is the really big one - at some point it's cheaper to bring ops/ hardware in-house. I just don't agree that lock-in is a huge issue, and I really disagree with the idea that lambdas make lock-in harder.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Well, what scale would that be? Larger than Netflix?
      - late2part 8y ago
        No. At the scale of Netflix 7 years ago: https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2012/06/04/netflix-open-connect/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2012/06/04/netfl...
        scarface74 8y ago
        That’s just the CDN. Netflix is still by far AWS’s biggest customer and its compute is still on AWS. I don’t think most companies are going to be setting up colos at ISPs around the world.
      - pathseeker 8y ago
        The vast majority of Netflix's traffic is video and it's video is not served by Amazon. Using a company that bypasses Amazon for 99.999% of its traffic isn't exactly an Amazon success story.
        scarface74 8y ago
        Well, what do you think Netflix is doing to be AWS’s largest customer? Have you seen any of their presentations on YouTube from AWS reinvent? Where do you think they encode the videos? Handle sign ins, etc?
        parasubvert 8y ago
        That’s an incredibly ignorant and misleading statement. It’s sort of like saying a database isn’t valuable because 99.999% of requests hit the cache, and not the disk. Everything was built on Amazon and video is largely hosted on S3. Yes, there’s a large CDN in the mix too. That doesn’t take away from the achievement.
      - staticassertion 8y ago
wisswazz 8y ago
Why should they care, or even be in the loop for such a decision? You don’t ask your real estate agent on advice for fixing you electrical system I guess?
- scarface74 8y ago
  Of course your business folks care whether you are spending time adding business value and helping them make money. I’ve had to explain to a CTO before why I had my team spending time on a CI/CD pipeline. Even now that I have a CTO whose idea of “writing requirements” is throwing together a Python proof of concept script and playing with Athena (writing Sql against a large CSV file stored in S3), I still better be able to articulate business value for any technological tangents I am going on.
  - wisswazz 8y ago
    Sure. Agree totally, maybe I misread your previous comment a bit. What I meant is that run-of-the-mill business folks do not necessarily know how business value is created in terms of code and architecture.
- cthalupa 8y ago
  I don't know of any business where they wouldn't be involved. Not in the "Let's talk directly about implementation details" way, but in the "Driving product development and roadmap" and "ascertaining value to our customers" way. Any time spent on work that doesn't directly create value for customers is work that the business should be weighing in on. I'm not saying that you should never spend any time doing anything else - but these are trade offs that the product manager should be involved in, and one of their primary jobs is being able to weight the technical and business realities and figuring out where resources should be going.
yzmtf2008 8y ago
Both. It's why larger companies have infrastructure teams.

redisman 8y ago

As long as you write your own wrappers to the SDKs changing cloud providers is definitely doable. We started full AWS stack with Lambda but have now been slowly refactoring our way into more cloud-provider agnostic direction. It's definitely not an existential threat level lock-in. Serverless technology is only starting out still and I'm pretty sure 5 years from now Lambda won't be the go-to platform anyway. Plus honestly we've learned so much from the first big project on Lambda that writing the next one with all of that in mind will be pretty great (and agnostic).

scarface74 8y ago
And that goes back to developers using the repository pattern because one day the CTO might decide that they want to get rid of their 6-7 figure Oracle installation and migrate to Postgres. There is a lot more to migrating infrastructure at scale than writing a few facades. Heck, consultants get paid lots of money just to do a lift and shift and migrate a bunch of VMWare images from on prem to AWS.
staticassertion 8y ago
I don't believe that writing wrappers is particularly important, though I think that anyone who uses SQS is likely to build an abstraction over it at some point (as with all lower level communication protocols, at some point you build a "client library" that's more specific). As I said, at least in the cases of your database and your storage, being cloud-agnostic is trivial. Managed postgres is easy to migrate from, S3 shouldn't be hard to migrate from either. Certainly lambda doesn't impact this too much. > Serverless technology is only starting out still and I'm pretty sure 5 years from now Lambda won't be the go-to platform anyway. Plus honestly we've learned so much from the first big project on Lambda that writing the next one with all of that in mind will be pretty great (and agnostic). I realize it isn't entirely on-topic, but could you elaborate? I'm curious to hear more about your opinion on this, I'm not sure what the future of Serverless is.

cs02rm0 8y ago

a) You can build an abstraction service if you care about vendor lock-in so much ... It's really easy to avoid lockin, lambda really doesn't make it any harder than EC2 at all. Yes, you can build an abstraction layer. And maintain it. And hope that you don't get feature divergence underneath it. That's really, really expensive.

staticassertion 8y ago
I don't see how you could have missed (b).
- cs02rm0 8y ago
  I don't see why you think I have.