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Why is the alternative to serverless, colocating servers in a DC? The alternative is renting VMs from those same clouds. It works fine and is cheaper when you

by vp8989 6y ago

Why is the alternative to serverless, colocating servers in a DC? The alternative is renting VMs from those same clouds. It works fine and is cheaper when you work on software that actually has users. It also doesn't result in the cloud provider cramming a crappy under-baked programming model down your throat. Per request pricing and "scaling to zero" is just old fashioned unbundling. You are selling a smaller quantity of a product at a higher unit price and putting a bit of lipstick on that pig to convince people they are not getting hosed.

thethethethe 6y ago
> Why is the alternative to serverless, colocating servers in a DC? Because that’s what the author was comparing it to. Yes you can rent vms, and that works for many workloads. However serverless platforms provide other benefits like deployments, load balancing, and auto scaling that you’d need to setup yourself on raw vms. Plus, with services like AppEngine Flex you can run serverless on vms to cut costs if you have consistent traffic. > Per request pricing and "scaling to zero" is just old fashioned unbundling. You are selling a smaller quantity of a product at a higher unit price and putting a bit of lipstick on that pig to convince people they are not getting hosed. It really depends on your problem. Sometimes you might have a very low QPS service (like maybe a few QPH) and running a whole vm would be overkill. Some business have really bursty traffic and maybe some regions won’t get any traffic at all during the night but they still want to deliver low latency service to the people living on that side of the globe. Additionally, these are just reasons to serverless for scale to zero and ignores other benefits, like reduced operational costs, that business can use to justify paying more for compute time. There are lots of reasons to use and not use serverless for compute. I don’t think it is the solution for everyone and everything, but I do think the hate and FUD directed towards it is unwarranted and uniformed. Disclaimer: I work for Google, opinions are my own Edit: typos and disclaimer
- yters 6y ago
  I agree. I am working on a devops team that has assembled a half decent CI/CD infrastructure for widespread use at our company of 600 devs and thousands of apps. We are on our second iteration, which is even leaner and more invisible to the devs. However, we are seeing a move to serverless would be a net gain for all involved, specifically the scale to zero and not caring about the container and kubernetes configuration.
skohan 6y ago
I think "scaling from zero" is actually the more interesting part of server-less. With AWS for example, it's super trivial to get a lambda running: no EC2 instance size to choose or elastic IP address to set up. You don't even have to choose a back-end framework, or set up monitoring to make sure your system stays available. You can just start writing code directly in the console the very first hour you start your project if you want, and already have a functioning API. When you're working on your MVP, you can skip dev ops completely and get your infrastructure cost very close to zero. Then if you actually do end up building a product which is fortunate enough to have to worry about scale, you can work on cost optimization. I think this is a very relevant and valid use case for server-less.
kart23 6y ago
>when you work on software that actually has users. And if I don't have users? What's the number of 'users' where it becomes cheaper? Most of the web is idle 95% of the time. Theres no reason people should pay for so much VM time that they're not using.
1337shadow 6y ago
The best alternative IMHO is to just rent machines in DCs, it's cheap and powerful and you don't have to manage the hardware: https://oneprovider.com/dedicated-servers-in-north-america https://oneprovider.com/dedicated-servers-in-north-america

by vp8989 6y ago

thethethethe 6y ago

> Why is the alternative to serverless, colocating servers in a DC? Because that’s what the author was comparing it to. Yes you can rent vms, and that works for many workloads. However serverless platforms provide other benefits like deployments, load balancing, and auto scaling that you’d need to setup yourself on raw vms. Plus, with services like AppEngine Flex you can run serverless on vms to cut costs if you have consistent traffic. > Per request pricing and "scaling to zero" is just old fashioned unbundling. You are selling a smaller quantity of a product at a higher unit price and putting a bit of lipstick on that pig to convince people they are not getting hosed. It really depends on your problem. Sometimes you might have a very low QPS service (like maybe a few QPH) and running a whole vm would be overkill. Some business have really bursty traffic and maybe some regions won’t get any traffic at all during the night but they still want to deliver low latency service to the people living on that side of the globe. Additionally, these are just reasons to serverless for scale to zero and ignores other benefits, like reduced operational costs, that business can use to justify paying more for compute time. There are lots of reasons to use and not use serverless for compute. I don’t think it is the solution for everyone and everything, but I do think the hate and FUD directed towards it is unwarranted and uniformed. Disclaimer: I work for Google, opinions are my own Edit: typos and disclaimer

yters 6y ago
I agree. I am working on a devops team that has assembled a half decent CI/CD infrastructure for widespread use at our company of 600 devs and thousands of apps. We are on our second iteration, which is even leaner and more invisible to the devs. However, we are seeing a move to serverless would be a net gain for all involved, specifically the scale to zero and not caring about the container and kubernetes configuration.

skohan 6y ago

I think "scaling from zero" is actually the more interesting part of server-less. With AWS for example, it's super trivial to get a lambda running: no EC2 instance size to choose or elastic IP address to set up. You don't even have to choose a back-end framework, or set up monitoring to make sure your system stays available. You can just start writing code directly in the console the very first hour you start your project if you want, and already have a functioning API. When you're working on your MVP, you can skip dev ops completely and get your infrastructure cost very close to zero. Then if you actually do end up building a product which is fortunate enough to have to worry about scale, you can work on cost optimization. I think this is a very relevant and valid use case for server-less.

kart23 6y ago

>when you work on software that actually has users. And if I don't have users? What's the number of 'users' where it becomes cheaper? Most of the web is idle 95% of the time. Theres no reason people should pay for so much VM time that they're not using.

1337shadow 6y ago

The best alternative IMHO is to just rent machines in DCs, it's cheap and powerful and you don't have to manage the hardware: https://oneprovider.com/dedicated-servers-in-north-america https://oneprovider.com/dedicated-servers-in-north-america