4 ms·

I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of featur

by baxuz 7y ago

I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of features.

zoul 7y ago
For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it’s very refreshing not having to care where and how my server code runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is written against some simple HTTP request interface, there shouldn’t be much trouble to move it elsewhere.
- baxuz 7y ago
  I've recently had a simple requirement. To build a site with content gated behind a paywall. There's no way to have SSR'd gated content without paying a gazillion bucks to either netlify or next for role-based redirects. Even if I would go for CSR'd content for the gated part, I'd have to fiddle with JWT tokens. To handle users, I'd have to use a 3rd party service such as oauth, since zeit doesn't support users, and netlify's model is severely limited. For a CMS, I'd have to again go for a subscription model. Data and APIs are also another issue. There is no way to use something like Strapi since that needs to have a real DB behind it. Now, to orchestrate the users for role-base redirects, oauth, payment gateaway data and everything else... I've no idea where to even start.
  - inapis 7y ago
    Ghost? They recent rolled out inbuilt memberships. Wont work if you are selling one time access though.
  - searchableguy 7y ago
    Don't. Just use a real backend. btw, Hasura can work with Google cloud run and heroku. Check it out. It's similar to strapi.
    - nunopato 7y ago
      Nhost (https://nhost.io/ https://nhost.io/) is another option for Hasura.
      - lucasverra 7y ago
        have you used this in production ? any recco ?
  - rpeden 7y ago
    Wouldn't WordPress with a couple of plugins solve the content with a paywall problem in about 15 minutes? I'm not asking that flippantly. And I know there are plenty of reasons not to use WP, so I apologize if this is a dumb question. It just seems like WP might solve that particular problem for you without much work. And it solves other problems too, like managing users and tracking revision history for every piece of content. I think Digital Ocean has a one click setup for WordPress. WP isn't my favorite software to work with as a developer, but I use it when it's the right took for the job because for the most part, I've been able to deploy it and forget about it because it has just kept chugging along and getting the job done without any intervention from me.
    - mercer 7y ago
      I use Wordpress for many clients because it's the simplest solution that also ensure they can find other developers to take over if I'm not there. Wordpress is a dumpster fire and I hate it with a passion, though. Like, viscerally, almost as much as I dislike Drupal and Joomla. I'd use the term PTSD but that strikes me as insensitive. But I still use it for many clients, because it's the simplest, easiest solution that other (and crucially, cheap!) developers can take over when I'm not there anymore.
  - stevenkkim 7y ago
    I don’t know if this would meet your needs, but I recently built a gated static site for personal use using Gatsby + Firebase for Auth and Hosting. Firebase Auth took 10 minutes to set up. I didn’t need a DB but I will use Firestore if needed in the future. All of it was quite easy and enjoyable to do.
- pbreit 7y ago
  So, where do you host? What data store do you use?
  - zoul 7y ago
    Last thing we needed was a simple unsubscribe service for a database hosted on AirTable, a few lines of code. It totally makes sense to me to host such glue on Now.
  - dominotw 7y ago
    I host data on firebase db use firebase cloud functions for "serverless" compute. I just do android development and never mess with AWS/k8s/whatever.
    - pbreit 7y ago
      Firebase is my favorite at the moment. I like that it combines functions & db. And has a simple DB viewer.
danharaj 7y ago
Serverless is just zoomer Common Gateway Interface for venture capitalists
dfee 7y ago
You trade known deployment problems for unknown infra management problems. You reduce the complexity of contribution significantly. If you’re at a company that wants to manage K8s, and you’ve chosen to invest in that direction, then serverless doesn’t make a lot of sense. If your customers aren’t buying compute, then you should be wary of large investments that are outside your core focus. Sure, there are quite a few problems with lambdas. But the abstraction you’re working at is much more atomic. And you don’t need FTEs to manage K8s and introduce a completely new set of problems. Less is more (is the argument).
- manigandham 7y ago
  You don't need serverless/FaaS for that. PaaS has existed for a long time, and many providers will now let you run any container image which is a lot more portable than custom frameworks. Zeit v1 actually did this.
wpietri 7y ago
I think there are legitimate use cases. E.g., I needed to help somebody with a little glue between Twilio and a SaaS tool. It was really nice to take a couple of functions, turn them into endpoints, and know that Amazon was going to worry about keeping them always available. I agree it's so far wildly overblown, but I get that too. A lot of people are scared by ops, and "serverless" promises they don't have to think about it. For those of us comfortable with ops, even the name is an obvious lie. But for people who just have some code they want to run, getting it usefully deployed is still too hard. Right now I feel like we're in a transitional era. The old model of individual single-purpose or multi-purpose servers is obviously inadequate. "Virtual server" is like "horseless carriage"; we know that the old paradigm is wrong, but we haven't found the new one. There are lots of contenders, but it seems like none of them have nailed it. The similar era for automobiles was circa 1900, where steam, electric, and internal combustion were all duking it out, with dozens of small manufacturers. I'll be very interested to see what we consolidate around.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
minieggs 7y ago
To offer another perspective... I've migrated services to/from Now v2 (never used v1). While recently moving a Go service off (to a regular server) all that was changed was some bash that executed in a pre-deploy hook and the `now` command was swapped for a `scp`. `sed 's/package main/package handler/g'`. Of course, this is much simpler if the services are created with migration in mind. I like to think of the builder options put in the `now.json` file as I would a webpack config.
dzonga 7y ago
people are in love with engineering but not shipping paid products. a rails | django | laravel developer is busy shipping. while someone is busy developing 1000s microservices. n that's before the complexity of react, redux n graphql
justrudd 7y ago
I built an ETL on top of AWS Lambda. I had to pull data from Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest on a schedule - once an hour. The pipeline took about 3 minutes to run. I used a CloudEvent cron to kick it off, a few lambdas, stored the raw data in S3, had another lambda massage that data, stored the final data into S3, and put a message into SQS letting my OLTP system know that it could bring it in. Worked great. Were there other ways to build it? Sure. Could have done it on the same hosts that my OLTP system was running on. But the amount of memory it used for that 3 minutes doubled the amount that was needed on the host normally. Yes I could have optimized it. But my time was better spent figuring out other issues (I was sole developer on the project). So I just broke it into a bunch of different parts and kicked up to Lambda. Worked great. Never had any issues with it. Never worried about not having resources. I think it cost .2 to .8 USD each run? So ~600 USD a month at the high end. And it took me less than a day to break it up and get it running vs who knows how long to optimize. So it definitely solved a problem I had in a very efficient way, and allowed me to speed it up just by spending money.
yencabulator 7y ago
> It leads to so much vendor lock-in Only if your chosen vendor designed for that lock-in. Google Cloud Run is serverless that just runs whatever container serving HTTP you throw at it, no "lambda functions" needed.
- richardkmichael 7y ago
  No horse in this race, but isn't "serverless" via containers on AWS done with Fargate?

by baxuz 7y ago

I honestly don't understand this fetishization of "serverless" functions. It leads to so much vendor lock-in, tooling complexity, and straight-up lack of features.

zoul 7y ago

For me as a noob with very simple requirements, it’s very refreshing not having to care where and how my server code runs. Just add to a repo, push and forget. And if my code is written against some simple HTTP request interface, there shouldn’t be much trouble to move it elsewhere.

baxuz 7y ago
I've recently had a simple requirement. To build a site with content gated behind a paywall. There's no way to have SSR'd gated content without paying a gazillion bucks to either netlify or next for role-based redirects. Even if I would go for CSR'd content for the gated part, I'd have to fiddle with JWT tokens. To handle users, I'd have to use a 3rd party service such as oauth, since zeit doesn't support users, and netlify's model is severely limited. For a CMS, I'd have to again go for a subscription model. Data and APIs are also another issue. There is no way to use something like Strapi since that needs to have a real DB behind it. Now, to orchestrate the users for role-base redirects, oauth, payment gateaway data and everything else... I've no idea where to even start.
- inapis 7y ago
  Ghost? They recent rolled out inbuilt memberships. Wont work if you are selling one time access though.
- searchableguy 7y ago
  Don't. Just use a real backend. btw, Hasura can work with Google cloud run and heroku. Check it out. It's similar to strapi.
  - nunopato 7y ago
    Nhost (https://nhost.io/ https://nhost.io/) is another option for Hasura.
    - lucasverra 7y ago
      have you used this in production ? any recco ?
- rpeden 7y ago
  Wouldn't WordPress with a couple of plugins solve the content with a paywall problem in about 15 minutes? I'm not asking that flippantly. And I know there are plenty of reasons not to use WP, so I apologize if this is a dumb question. It just seems like WP might solve that particular problem for you without much work. And it solves other problems too, like managing users and tracking revision history for every piece of content. I think Digital Ocean has a one click setup for WordPress. WP isn't my favorite software to work with as a developer, but I use it when it's the right took for the job because for the most part, I've been able to deploy it and forget about it because it has just kept chugging along and getting the job done without any intervention from me.
  - mercer 7y ago
    I use Wordpress for many clients because it's the simplest solution that also ensure they can find other developers to take over if I'm not there. Wordpress is a dumpster fire and I hate it with a passion, though. Like, viscerally, almost as much as I dislike Drupal and Joomla. I'd use the term PTSD but that strikes me as insensitive. But I still use it for many clients, because it's the simplest, easiest solution that other (and crucially, cheap!) developers can take over when I'm not there anymore.
- stevenkkim 7y ago
  I don’t know if this would meet your needs, but I recently built a gated static site for personal use using Gatsby + Firebase for Auth and Hosting. Firebase Auth took 10 minutes to set up. I didn’t need a DB but I will use Firestore if needed in the future. All of it was quite easy and enjoyable to do.
pbreit 7y ago
So, where do you host? What data store do you use?
- zoul 7y ago
  Last thing we needed was a simple unsubscribe service for a database hosted on AirTable, a few lines of code. It totally makes sense to me to host such glue on Now.
- dominotw 7y ago
  I host data on firebase db use firebase cloud functions for "serverless" compute. I just do android development and never mess with AWS/k8s/whatever.
  - pbreit 7y ago
    Firebase is my favorite at the moment. I like that it combines functions & db. And has a simple DB viewer.

danharaj 7y ago

Serverless is just zoomer Common Gateway Interface for venture capitalists

dfee 7y ago

You trade known deployment problems for unknown infra management problems. You reduce the complexity of contribution significantly. If you’re at a company that wants to manage K8s, and you’ve chosen to invest in that direction, then serverless doesn’t make a lot of sense. If your customers aren’t buying compute, then you should be wary of large investments that are outside your core focus. Sure, there are quite a few problems with lambdas. But the abstraction you’re working at is much more atomic. And you don’t need FTEs to manage K8s and introduce a completely new set of problems. Less is more (is the argument).

manigandham 7y ago
You don't need serverless/FaaS for that. PaaS has existed for a long time, and many providers will now let you run any container image which is a lot more portable than custom frameworks. Zeit v1 actually did this.

wpietri 7y ago

I think there are legitimate use cases. E.g., I needed to help somebody with a little glue between Twilio and a SaaS tool. It was really nice to take a couple of functions, turn them into endpoints, and know that Amazon was going to worry about keeping them always available. I agree it's so far wildly overblown, but I get that too. A lot of people are scared by ops, and "serverless" promises they don't have to think about it. For those of us comfortable with ops, even the name is an obvious lie. But for people who just have some code they want to run, getting it usefully deployed is still too hard. Right now I feel like we're in a transitional era. The old model of individual single-purpose or multi-purpose servers is obviously inadequate. "Virtual server" is like "horseless carriage"; we know that the old paradigm is wrong, but we haven't found the new one. There are lots of contenders, but it seems like none of them have nailed it. The similar era for automobiles was circa 1900, where steam, electric, and internal combustion were all duking it out, with dozens of small manufacturers. I'll be very interested to see what we consolidate around.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

minieggs 7y ago

To offer another perspective... I've migrated services to/from Now v2 (never used v1). While recently moving a Go service off (to a regular server) all that was changed was some bash that executed in a pre-deploy hook and the `now` command was swapped for a `scp`. `sed 's/package main/package handler/g'`. Of course, this is much simpler if the services are created with migration in mind. I like to think of the builder options put in the `now.json` file as I would a webpack config.

dzonga 7y ago

people are in love with engineering but not shipping paid products. a rails | django | laravel developer is busy shipping. while someone is busy developing 1000s microservices. n that's before the complexity of react, redux n graphql

justrudd 7y ago

I built an ETL on top of AWS Lambda. I had to pull data from Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest on a schedule - once an hour. The pipeline took about 3 minutes to run. I used a CloudEvent cron to kick it off, a few lambdas, stored the raw data in S3, had another lambda massage that data, stored the final data into S3, and put a message into SQS letting my OLTP system know that it could bring it in. Worked great. Were there other ways to build it? Sure. Could have done it on the same hosts that my OLTP system was running on. But the amount of memory it used for that 3 minutes doubled the amount that was needed on the host normally. Yes I could have optimized it. But my time was better spent figuring out other issues (I was sole developer on the project). So I just broke it into a bunch of different parts and kicked up to Lambda. Worked great. Never had any issues with it. Never worried about not having resources. I think it cost .2 to .8 USD each run? So ~600 USD a month at the high end. And it took me less than a day to break it up and get it running vs who knows how long to optimize. So it definitely solved a problem I had in a very efficient way, and allowed me to speed it up just by spending money.

yencabulator 7y ago

> It leads to so much vendor lock-in Only if your chosen vendor designed for that lock-in. Google Cloud Run is serverless that just runs whatever container serving HTTP you throw at it, no "lambda functions" needed.

richardkmichael 7y ago
No horse in this race, but isn't "serverless" via containers on AWS done with Fargate?