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> There's also this enduring myth you see repeated even here of how much saving there is by not having "devops", when only very big companies needed them in the

> There's also this enduring myth you see repeated even here of how much saving there is by not having "devops", when only very big companies needed them in the first place. I dunno, the first company I worked at was very small, under 30 people, sales included, and I was hired on as an SA. If they were using serverless, they would not have needed to hire me. Deployments and system upgrades were very toilsome. The dev lead would spend a few hours deploying new code and we’d only do it around midnight in case there was a problem (our customers were almost entirely US based). I spent a lot of my time automating OS upgrades on the web servers behind our proxy. All of this work would be unnecessary for that small company if they were using serverless. Additionally, as mentioned before, the majority of their traffic was during the day so they could have scaled down automatically at night, cutting costs. Would this be cheaper than running machines 24/7? I’m not sure, but I could see why you’d be interested in at least looking into it

kortilla 6y ago
> Deployments and system upgrades were very toilsome. The dev lead would spend a few hours deploying new code and we’d only do it around midnight in case there was a problem (our customers were almost entirely US based). I spent a lot of my time automating OS upgrades on the web servers behind our proxy. All of this work would be unnecessary for that small company if they were using serverless. Not using serverless doesn’t mean there can’t be a CICD pipeline.
- thethethethe 6y ago
  Yeah of course. I’m not saying that serverless is the only ci-cd solution, many businesses build ci-cd pipelines on top of serverless apis. However, most serverless platforms take care of a lot of the deployment process out of the box, which would have been enough for the business I was describing in my comment
winrid 6y ago
You don't even need serverless for those things. Any of the automated deployment/orchestration systems in the last ten years solve those problem (ansible, terraform, etc).
- thethethethe 6y ago
  Yeah it’s true but it requires a lot more config. The job I mentioned in my comment involved thousands of lines of anisble to perform operations you wouldn’t even need to consider/could perform in a few clicks when using a serverless platform. Don’t get me wrong—serverless platforms are not a ci-cd silver bullet. Many organizations build pipelines on top of serverless deployment apis, but it certainly does take care of a lot of things for you—not to mention other features mentioned elsewhere in my comments
  - 1337shadow 6y ago
    You're supposed to encapsulate those in reusable roles, see an example methodology here: https://yourlabs.org/posts/2020-02-08-bigsudo-extreme-devops-hacking-operations/ https://yourlabs.org/posts/2020-02-08-bigsudo-extreme-devops... And since we have containers it's become really much easier actually ... Deploy a Traefik container which will watch dockerd socket and self-configure HTTPS and all when your other script starts container. Really, it's much easier than back in the days: https://github.com/jpic/bashworks/tree/master/vps https://github.com/jpic/bashworks/tree/master/vps
    - nojvek 6y ago
      Wasn’t the original post complaining about avoiding a gazillion lines of config in the first place ?
      - 1337shadow 6y ago
        Lines of config are like lines of code, refactoring them regularity is basic hygiene like brushing your teeth. You can "have no config lines" if you go ahead and click your config but then you don't have "infra as code" anymore so that's also "going back to the 70's" I guess.
manigandham 6y ago
All you needed was PaaS, which has existed for a long time. Or the even older name: managed services, offered by pretty much any decent hosting provider for decades. I remember using companies like MediaTemplate and FullControl 10 years ago for clients and not having to worry about OS updates.
- thethethethe 6y ago
  Serverless is a PaaS. And yeah, those services could work too. Serverless isn’t the only solution that works.
grey-area 6y ago
I don’t think your past experience reflects current practice. My reality at a 20 person shop with a few devs is much closer to the OP - a few hours setup (we save the cloud config and can remake servers in a few minutes), servers run for months without intervention, uptime is on par with cloud services, deploys take seconds. Managing servers or deploys just are not major problems for us. Serverless is not a solution to deploy problems - mostly because they’re just not significant problems for us, if anything the dev deploy story is worse than renting VMs. It’s an interesting take on serving requests and I do believe some variant of it might be the future (a variant more like cloudflare workers IMO), but at present there are serious drawbacks and it is not clearly better, particularly when provided by a predatory company like Amazon.
1337shadow 6y ago
When your infra is in AWS, you need an "AWS Certified DevOps"[0] instead of a "typical DevOps", I mean, the typical OSS hacker - which is kind of sad really, and makes me wonder: is this how we're going to build an Idiocracy[1] ? Anyway, things like backups, monitoring, alerting, debugging, is going to be a requirement anyway, and for me it's harder when locked in proprietary stuff such as AWS, I'd rather have OSS I have freedom to hack ;) [0] https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-devops-engineer-professional/ https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-devops-engine... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy#Plot

kortilla 6y ago

> Deployments and system upgrades were very toilsome. The dev lead would spend a few hours deploying new code and we’d only do it around midnight in case there was a problem (our customers were almost entirely US based). I spent a lot of my time automating OS upgrades on the web servers behind our proxy. All of this work would be unnecessary for that small company if they were using serverless. Not using serverless doesn’t mean there can’t be a CICD pipeline.

thethethethe 6y ago
Yeah of course. I’m not saying that serverless is the only ci-cd solution, many businesses build ci-cd pipelines on top of serverless apis. However, most serverless platforms take care of a lot of the deployment process out of the box, which would have been enough for the business I was describing in my comment

winrid 6y ago

You don't even need serverless for those things. Any of the automated deployment/orchestration systems in the last ten years solve those problem (ansible, terraform, etc).

thethethethe 6y ago
Yeah it’s true but it requires a lot more config. The job I mentioned in my comment involved thousands of lines of anisble to perform operations you wouldn’t even need to consider/could perform in a few clicks when using a serverless platform. Don’t get me wrong—serverless platforms are not a ci-cd silver bullet. Many organizations build pipelines on top of serverless deployment apis, but it certainly does take care of a lot of things for you—not to mention other features mentioned elsewhere in my comments
- 1337shadow 6y ago
  You're supposed to encapsulate those in reusable roles, see an example methodology here: https://yourlabs.org/posts/2020-02-08-bigsudo-extreme-devops-hacking-operations/ https://yourlabs.org/posts/2020-02-08-bigsudo-extreme-devops... And since we have containers it's become really much easier actually ... Deploy a Traefik container which will watch dockerd socket and self-configure HTTPS and all when your other script starts container. Really, it's much easier than back in the days: https://github.com/jpic/bashworks/tree/master/vps https://github.com/jpic/bashworks/tree/master/vps
  - nojvek 6y ago
    Wasn’t the original post complaining about avoiding a gazillion lines of config in the first place ?
    - 1337shadow 6y ago
      Lines of config are like lines of code, refactoring them regularity is basic hygiene like brushing your teeth. You can "have no config lines" if you go ahead and click your config but then you don't have "infra as code" anymore so that's also "going back to the 70's" I guess.

manigandham 6y ago

All you needed was PaaS, which has existed for a long time. Or the even older name: managed services, offered by pretty much any decent hosting provider for decades. I remember using companies like MediaTemplate and FullControl 10 years ago for clients and not having to worry about OS updates.

thethethethe 6y ago
Serverless is a PaaS. And yeah, those services could work too. Serverless isn’t the only solution that works.

grey-area 6y ago

I don’t think your past experience reflects current practice. My reality at a 20 person shop with a few devs is much closer to the OP - a few hours setup (we save the cloud config and can remake servers in a few minutes), servers run for months without intervention, uptime is on par with cloud services, deploys take seconds. Managing servers or deploys just are not major problems for us. Serverless is not a solution to deploy problems - mostly because they’re just not significant problems for us, if anything the dev deploy story is worse than renting VMs. It’s an interesting take on serving requests and I do believe some variant of it might be the future (a variant more like cloudflare workers IMO), but at present there are serious drawbacks and it is not clearly better, particularly when provided by a predatory company like Amazon.

1337shadow 6y ago

When your infra is in AWS, you need an "AWS Certified DevOps"[0] instead of a "typical DevOps", I mean, the typical OSS hacker - which is kind of sad really, and makes me wonder: is this how we're going to build an Idiocracy[1] ? Anyway, things like backups, monitoring, alerting, debugging, is going to be a requirement anyway, and for me it's harder when locked in proprietary stuff such as AWS, I'd rather have OSS I have freedom to hack ;) [0] https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-devops-engineer-professional/ https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-devops-engine... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy#Plot