6 ms·

Lists like this make me feel like I have a fundamental disconnect with serverless. I've yet to experience this low cost of development. Granted, I have a fair b

Lists like this make me feel like I have a fundamental disconnect with serverless. I've yet to experience this low cost of development. Granted, I have a fair bit of sysadmin experience. But, with serverless it feels like I'm trading general system knowledge for arcane provider knowledge. I tried for weeks on nights and weekends to get anything beyond a simple todo app running with AWS Amplify. I kept running into issues with DynamoDB or AppSync or Cognito. Every time I tried to do something even remotely off the beaten path (e.g., sorting todos by creation date rather than by DynamoDB's non-deterministic sort), I had to tear the whole thing down and start over. I tried to use the serverless tool, but couldn't even really tell how to get started. They usher you along a sign-up flow before you can even try anything. And a lot of the documentation is just a weird mix of sample projects in various languages. I eventually gave up and just went back to using Heroku for now and will probably land on a DigitalOcean droplet. I really wanted to like serverless, but it wasn't saving me any time and scaling isn't a concern for a side project :-/

soygul 7y ago
Having used both AWS Lamda + DynamoDB and Firebase Functions + Firestore, I would say Firebase is much much simpler than AWS anything and documentation is just excellent. However Firestore has major restrictions and is ridiculously expensive. I guess great open-source starter kits still didn't catch up to serverless stuff so it makes jumping in a bit harder. And yes, the restrictions all need workarounds for now. But every year I check serverless stuff, it gets better. I guess it is just not there yet at the moment.
- databrecht 7y ago
  Did you try FaunaDB by any chance? I'm interested in how people who have worked with DynamoDB and Firestore would perceive FaunaDB once they get started. Imho it's is the most serverless database on the market at this point due to features such as: pay as you go, distributed, strongly consistent, security model and their API. When I started using it a while back it didn't feel limited to me at all. (Disclaimer, I have started to work there in the mean time)
  - soygul 7y ago
    I didn't. I briefly checked it out while researching new scalable databases but Fauna looked so young so I didn't dig deeper so I cannot make a comparison.
shantly 7y ago
Modern web development really makes me miss "copy some files to /var/www/html" as a deployment system. Or maybe a cute little `ln` shuffle if you wanna get fancy.
potta_coffee 7y ago
I'm at the tail-end of developing a fairly substantial serverless application and I'm not impressed. We encountered lots of little undocumented caveats, and had to rebuild the thing 2 - 3 times before getting it right. My opinion - aws serverless isn't ready for serious projects. I might offload very tiny microservices as serverless applications.
smizzle 7y ago
> I've yet to experience this low cost of development In my very limited experience, the yaml configuration was a pain, and the testing environment was different enough from production that it felt cumbersome to keep up with both of them. So now instead of using Serverless, I use expressjs for my API controllers, and I build a Docker image that works exactly the same for testing and production.

soygul 7y ago

Having used both AWS Lamda + DynamoDB and Firebase Functions + Firestore, I would say Firebase is much much simpler than AWS anything and documentation is just excellent. However Firestore has major restrictions and is ridiculously expensive. I guess great open-source starter kits still didn't catch up to serverless stuff so it makes jumping in a bit harder. And yes, the restrictions all need workarounds for now. But every year I check serverless stuff, it gets better. I guess it is just not there yet at the moment.

databrecht 7y ago
Did you try FaunaDB by any chance? I'm interested in how people who have worked with DynamoDB and Firestore would perceive FaunaDB once they get started. Imho it's is the most serverless database on the market at this point due to features such as: pay as you go, distributed, strongly consistent, security model and their API. When I started using it a while back it didn't feel limited to me at all. (Disclaimer, I have started to work there in the mean time)
- soygul 7y ago
  I didn't. I briefly checked it out while researching new scalable databases but Fauna looked so young so I didn't dig deeper so I cannot make a comparison.

shantly 7y ago

Modern web development really makes me miss "copy some files to /var/www/html" as a deployment system. Or maybe a cute little `ln` shuffle if you wanna get fancy.

potta_coffee 7y ago

I'm at the tail-end of developing a fairly substantial serverless application and I'm not impressed. We encountered lots of little undocumented caveats, and had to rebuild the thing 2 - 3 times before getting it right. My opinion - aws serverless isn't ready for serious projects. I might offload very tiny microservices as serverless applications.

smizzle 7y ago

> I've yet to experience this low cost of development In my very limited experience, the yaml configuration was a pain, and the testing environment was different enough from production that it felt cumbersome to keep up with both of them. So now instead of using Serverless, I use expressjs for my API controllers, and I build a Docker image that works exactly the same for testing and production.