6 ms·

Three worries for me: 1. I know the risk of only being able to peer through the fence at the distant piece of software that is running your business, unable to

by setquk 8y ago

Three worries for me: 1. I know the risk of only being able to peer through the fence at the distant piece of software that is running your business, unable to gain any insight while your production application is limping badly and customers are running away like water. On top of that, thrashing it out with Mr Clippy is better than average support. If my business depends on it I want experts at hand who have the tools and the access they need to do the job they do. 2. The insane pace of serverless is entirely fad driven and lacks quality engineering which is required for critical pieces of software. The tools are universally poor quality, unstable, unreliable, poorly documented and built on gaining mindshare, making IPO and selling conference seats. Best practice never materialise as the rate of change does not allow an ecosystem to settle and work the bugs out. The friction is absolutely terrible but no one speaks of this in fear of their cloud project being labelled a failure. Every person I have spoken to for months is hiding little pockets of pain under a banner of success. Some people clearly will never deliver and burn mountains of cash hiding this. 3. Once you enter an ecosystem, you are at the mercy of the ecosystem entirely, be that a service provider or a tool. Portability is always valuable. It has cost, scalability, redundancy and risk benefits far beyond the short term gain of a single vendor decision. I'm currently laughing at an AWS quote for a SQL Server instance with half the grunt, no redundancy, no insight possible for only 2x the capex and opex combined of dedicated hardware including staff. But can't move to Azure because everything is tied into SQS. I can never be behind anything but IaaS myself. This is contrarian especially in this arena but I will put my 25 years of experience on the line every time and say that it is the right thing to do. IaaS is choice, flexibility, allows you to gain deep insights and protects you from serfdom, fad technology and pick and choose mature products rather than what the vendor sees fit. This is just another rehash of buying a mainframe. It's just bigger and you pay hourly to write COBOL.

johnwyles 8y ago
1. You have to pay for those but the thinking goes that if you are at the complexity and scale of those problems you reach out to a TAM to sort them out for you (ie. $$$). 2. Give it time; this will evolve and it is still in its infancy. Like all things it is buggy in the beginning but as adoption hockey-sticks so too will the stability, documentation, etc. 3. Portability is traded for breadth of services and depth is gained through vendor lock-in and the one-size-fits-all package. Of your concerns I would say this one will be around for a long time or at least until a "conversion kit" is built to shoehorn all of your stuff into another provider allowing you to jump ship or test the waters elsewhere. I am a veteran like you (20 years) and while you choose IaaS because you like the control most want to punt their problem to someone else and to pay for that. If our goal is to get from LAX to JFK we could fly our own plane, charting our own course, looking up weather, doing engine checks, refueling, dealing with air traffic control. and we'll get there and be in full control the whole way. However most will pay to be shuttled in to a commercial airplane. Then of course there are some that are willing to pay more to have their own personal pilot get them there in a chartered aircraft where they are afforded a more tailored experience. There are some really great pilots you can hire out there to do it all for you (or if you are in fact one yourself) but if the goal is to simply go from point A to point B in as little time as possible we don't have time to find, train, and rely on a single pilot or ourself to get there. We will take the hit and pay others to get us there. That is what all this serverless non-sense is about if you ask me. The tradeoffs of simplicity and handing the busywork off to someone else is more enticing than the control we have in the process. Also, isn't it nice to be able to say, when you arrive late, that it was the airlines fault? :)

by setquk 8y ago

johnwyles 8y ago

1. You have to pay for those but the thinking goes that if you are at the complexity and scale of those problems you reach out to a TAM to sort them out for you (ie. $$$). 2. Give it time; this will evolve and it is still in its infancy. Like all things it is buggy in the beginning but as adoption hockey-sticks so too will the stability, documentation, etc. 3. Portability is traded for breadth of services and depth is gained through vendor lock-in and the one-size-fits-all package. Of your concerns I would say this one will be around for a long time or at least until a "conversion kit" is built to shoehorn all of your stuff into another provider allowing you to jump ship or test the waters elsewhere. I am a veteran like you (20 years) and while you choose IaaS because you like the control most want to punt their problem to someone else and to pay for that. If our goal is to get from LAX to JFK we could fly our own plane, charting our own course, looking up weather, doing engine checks, refueling, dealing with air traffic control. and we'll get there and be in full control the whole way. However most will pay to be shuttled in to a commercial airplane. Then of course there are some that are willing to pay more to have their own personal pilot get them there in a chartered aircraft where they are afforded a more tailored experience. There are some really great pilots you can hire out there to do it all for you (or if you are in fact one yourself) but if the goal is to simply go from point A to point B in as little time as possible we don't have time to find, train, and rely on a single pilot or ourself to get there. We will take the hit and pay others to get us there. That is what all this serverless non-sense is about if you ask me. The tradeoffs of simplicity and handing the busywork off to someone else is more enticing than the control we have in the process. Also, isn't it nice to be able to say, when you arrive late, that it was the airlines fault? :)