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> 1. Someone else maintains the software running these services, including OS upgrades, security upgrades and patches, uptime monitoring, etc. This is the stan

by tuldia 7y ago

> 1. Someone else maintains the software running these services, including OS upgrades, security upgrades and patches, uptime monitoring, etc. This is the standard marketing phrase echoed to promote serverless. By experience, I don't think is valid. Packages like unattended-upgrades automates all this stuff. Also, not being able to verify what the software is doing is scary and looks like a 10 steps backwards to me. > 2. Since every logical component is an independent service, each scaling independently, any one single component is unlikely to become a bottle-neck while scaling. In traditional monolithic servers, you'll have to have contingency plans if you beat storage/network/CPU/RAM limits Except when it comes with a bottle-neck by default. Running mail servers requires rather little resource. > 3. The closest thing to this is to break up a monolithic email server into microservices and deploy them as independently scalable containers, which is a considerable engineering effort. Why in earth? Have you seen the postfix architecture? > Assuming this works as advertised, you can go from zero to a full blown email service for organizations with thousands of people (assuming the stated AWS limits are lifted), in record time. I'm pretty sure one can have a up and running mail server while the "cloudformation" thingy will still be running :)

xienze 7y ago
The long and short of it is that “serverless” is all done on a pay-per-use basis. So is running a VM to host an email server — let’s say $5/month on the low end. With this setup you’d be paying pennies a month assuming normal personal usage. If you were running an email server for your Fortune 500 company, yeah this wouldn’t make sense. But for personal usage? Assuming SES isn’t on the shit list of Google et al this is fire-and-forget, and dirt cheap.
- tastroder 7y ago
  This use case and logic seems really weird to sell the serverless buzzword. My personal email has been somebody else's problem since the 90s and is done through the provider of my personal domain at no additional cost. Setting up a serverless email server seems like something I'd have to bother with and maintain a few years down the line when the platform of choice inevitably changes something. Some use cases of serverless applications just shift maintenance efforts. Sure, I don't have to update OS packages. I still have to wonder if the service I'm using for my serverless stuff will be there (for startup vendors) in a few years or, more likely for vendors like AWS, change their terms, pricing or aspects of their API. I can pay a student intern to maintain a single VPS based $whatever, AWS consultants cost a multiple of that. If that's something you can and want to do yourself, sure, that's great - even for small use cases like this but then it becomes a philosophical toy problem more than a technical challenge.
steve76 7y ago
I'm working on a dat project implementation. If I could rely on the Nearby Connections API and SyncManager, I wouldn't need servers. The data would just go client to client and eventually hit the server which would be just another peer that can do things phones can't. Serverless to me is abstracting all the cloud providers away for provisioning, and it's first class. If Lambda's down, whatever hardware you could build and ship to a data center is down too. I now have access to the same critical data center tools. Also code completion. Take my code, and rewrite for performance and security. Run it on some OS that is always rewriting itself. I want the power not the grid.

by tuldia 7y ago

xienze 7y ago

The long and short of it is that “serverless” is all done on a pay-per-use basis. So is running a VM to host an email server — let’s say $5/month on the low end. With this setup you’d be paying pennies a month assuming normal personal usage. If you were running an email server for your Fortune 500 company, yeah this wouldn’t make sense. But for personal usage? Assuming SES isn’t on the shit list of Google et al this is fire-and-forget, and dirt cheap.

tastroder 7y ago
This use case and logic seems really weird to sell the serverless buzzword. My personal email has been somebody else's problem since the 90s and is done through the provider of my personal domain at no additional cost. Setting up a serverless email server seems like something I'd have to bother with and maintain a few years down the line when the platform of choice inevitably changes something. Some use cases of serverless applications just shift maintenance efforts. Sure, I don't have to update OS packages. I still have to wonder if the service I'm using for my serverless stuff will be there (for startup vendors) in a few years or, more likely for vendors like AWS, change their terms, pricing or aspects of their API. I can pay a student intern to maintain a single VPS based $whatever, AWS consultants cost a multiple of that. If that's something you can and want to do yourself, sure, that's great - even for small use cases like this but then it becomes a philosophical toy problem more than a technical challenge.

steve76 7y ago

I'm working on a dat project implementation. If I could rely on the Nearby Connections API and SyncManager, I wouldn't need servers. The data would just go client to client and eventually hit the server which would be just another peer that can do things phones can't. Serverless to me is abstracting all the cloud providers away for provisioning, and it's first class. If Lambda's down, whatever hardware you could build and ship to a data center is down too. I now have access to the same critical data center tools. Also code completion. Take my code, and rewrite for performance and security. Run it on some OS that is always rewriting itself. I want the power not the grid.