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Personally I love serverless, but this article definitely mirrors my own experience. In two jobs now I've been told to do things "serverless first" and both ti
by tonfreed 6y ago
Personally I love serverless, but this article definitely mirrors my own experience.
In two jobs now I've been told to do things "serverless first" and both times I've ended up with an ECS solution. My reason always boils down to the other tooling, particularly in regards to HTTP endpoints. AWS API gateway is an absolutely infuriating product.
My current thoughts are if you're working in the AWS ecosystem, with AWS tools, Lambda works fantastically. Using Lambdas to set off alarms and run playbooks has never let me down, and I've done a lot of data processing hanging lambdas off streams and it just works. Really well in fact.
Where it falls over is interacting with the outside world in a sane fashion. HTTP endpoints are a nightmare to set up and deploy in a semi-automated fashion, I've had things that matched what was in the docs that just don't work because of some random gotcha, the undocumented silliness around a "HTTP API Gateway" vs a "REST API Gateway" is another mind bogglingly frustrating thing. Not to mention all the latency issues I've had, which are far too many to blame on a cold boot of the lambda.
Serverless has its niche and it works really well, and real cheaply to boot. But it's not a generalised tool like the loudest evangelists like to pretend it is.