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I used to be very excited about serverless, and I still have high hopes for it. But for me it ended up replacing the complexity of runtime and frameworks with

by ratww 6y ago

I used to be very excited about serverless, and I still have high hopes for it. But for me it ended up replacing the complexity of runtime and frameworks with the complexity of configuring auxiliary srevices like Gateway API, Amazon VPC, etc. We needed to move the complexity to some tool that configured the services around Lambda, like Terraform or Cloud Formation, or at best to a framework like Claudia or Serverless.com. Configuring it by hand looks fine in tutorials, but is madness: it's still complex, and makes it all way too fragile. There are however some products that make the experience better by simplifying configuration, like Vercel and Netlify.

skohan 6y ago
Yeah I certainly agree that the complexity doesn't really go away completely, and sometimes it's much more frustrating to have to configure poorly documented services rather than just having access to the host OS. I guess my overall point would be that two of the hardest things to do in terms of making a production-ready application are scaling and security, and Serverless pretty much obviates them. So it's not a magic wand, but it does take away some of the significant barriers to entry.
- ratww 6y ago
  Yes, I agree with that point. I think my point was more that Serverless is a good idea, but the current implementations are still not good at removing complexity. But I can see this easily changing, with open standards and the such.
  - orlovs 6y ago
    Well, we just need to admit that running applications if ack all know risks are complex. If we blissfully ignore risks like lamp or lemp stack its much more easier. Main question do we need to take in account most of risks, running within small scale.
8note 6y ago
I was expecting writing serverless to be a mess of writing configuration, but I've really enjoyed writing CDK for cloudformation. It's super unclear how you're supposed to write good cdk code, but I feel like I'm a lot clearer on what infrastructure I'm actually using than before, where I was relying on stuff set up by someone else ages ago with minimal to no documentation

by ratww 6y ago

skohan 6y ago

Yeah I certainly agree that the complexity doesn't really go away completely, and sometimes it's much more frustrating to have to configure poorly documented services rather than just having access to the host OS. I guess my overall point would be that two of the hardest things to do in terms of making a production-ready application are scaling and security, and Serverless pretty much obviates them. So it's not a magic wand, but it does take away some of the significant barriers to entry.

ratww 6y ago
Yes, I agree with that point. I think my point was more that Serverless is a good idea, but the current implementations are still not good at removing complexity. But I can see this easily changing, with open standards and the such.
- orlovs 6y ago
  Well, we just need to admit that running applications if ack all know risks are complex. If we blissfully ignore risks like lamp or lemp stack its much more easier. Main question do we need to take in account most of risks, running within small scale.

8note 6y ago

I was expecting writing serverless to be a mess of writing configuration, but I've really enjoyed writing CDK for cloudformation. It's super unclear how you're supposed to write good cdk code, but I feel like I'm a lot clearer on what infrastructure I'm actually using than before, where I was relying on stuff set up by someone else ages ago with minimal to no documentation