15 ms·

Upon seeing this article while drinking my Sunday coffee I was reminded to do my weekly AWS serverless checkin. I noticed one of the Lambda functions briefly s

Upon seeing this article while drinking my Sunday coffee I was reminded to do my weekly AWS serverless checkin. I noticed one of the Lambda functions briefly spiked to 6 concurrent instances. Within a couple clicks I confirmed a bot was scanning the API, possibly looking for vulnerabilities. The built-in API throttling hopefully dissuaded the bot from further scans. Before serverless, my capacity planning for servers would have required accounting for this spike in “noise”. I would pay for a peak burst scale of 6 servers, but practically only use 1-2 for routine processing. My serverless infra are just “cattle”. AWS Lambda does some magic behind the scenes and determines when to kill an instance, recycle, or create a new one. I just feed it an occasional monolithic JAR that handles all API calls and queue handlers. From the OP _[With serverless].. You deploy individual stateless functions. But not inside a Java monolith, that is old, but on top of a distributed system._ This is where the Author seems to conflate the benefits of serverless with a particular architecture or code deployment model. The two are completely separate. Serverless is not just a technology, but from a lifestyle perspective it is a game changer. A solo software developer can rapidly experiment and test ideas until one starts to scale. Most of the experiments can be run in a “free tier”. And the costs of scaling are comparable to provisioning your own EC2 instances or containers.

kordlessagain 6y ago
> A solo software developer can rapidly experiment and test ideas until one starts to scale. In all fairness, this same thing can be done with virtual machines. VMs have been "cattle" for a long while now. "Serverless" just removes the start and stop buttons from your UI. There are still servers and there is still configuration, it's just being done on the conflations of others. What I find interesting is how many people feel the need to justify using whatever it is they are using when others are exercising their right to question whether or not all the tech we've built is "worth it". In many cases, having all this power of the cloud has just removed value from companies as they allow their employees to spin up whatever and leave it running because they don't know any better processes than what has been sold to them by crafty sales and marketing people. How many millions have been "blown" on cloud just to say something is started or running? My observations say "a lot".

kordlessagain 6y ago

> A solo software developer can rapidly experiment and test ideas until one starts to scale. In all fairness, this same thing can be done with virtual machines. VMs have been "cattle" for a long while now. "Serverless" just removes the start and stop buttons from your UI. There are still servers and there is still configuration, it's just being done on the conflations of others. What I find interesting is how many people feel the need to justify using whatever it is they are using when others are exercising their right to question whether or not all the tech we've built is "worth it". In many cases, having all this power of the cloud has just removed value from companies as they allow their employees to spin up whatever and leave it running because they don't know any better processes than what has been sold to them by crafty sales and marketing people. How many millions have been "blown" on cloud just to say something is started or running? My observations say "a lot".