3 ms·

Serverless is possibly the most interesting of the cloud offerings recently. For some types of work, it does seem to make a lot of sense economically as long as

Serverless is possibly the most interesting of the cloud offerings recently. For some types of work, it does seem to make a lot of sense economically as long as you can stand a short delay spinning up from a cold start. It's a little concerning that there isn't more consolidation on industry standards for this yet, though. Basically everyone providing cloud hosting has something that is a VM and something that is a managed database. If you build your system with any standard tech like Linux or popular programming languages or major databases, it's going to run on any cloud platform you like with relatively little change. However, to do most useful things with serverless, you're going to need to tie into a specific cloud provider's ecosystem to a much greater extent. That means a lot of platform-specific code talking to proprietary APIs, which feels like it could become a significant drag if you were using serverless for core aspects of your software rather than just the occasional bonus.

sofixa 6y ago
> It's a little concerning that there isn't more consolidation on industry standards for this yet, though. There is, you can run serverless Docker on GCP, AWS and Scaleway at the very least.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  But as soon as you have Docker involved, you have reintroduced much of the complexity you had running vanilla VMs anyway. Serverless is then little more than an economic decision, something that might be a bit cheaper than maintaining a full-time VM to do whatever it is you're doing, as long as you can tolerate the code start penalty (which is typically greater when using Docker). The main value in serverless, to me at least, is in the ability to write only the actual functionality you need and not care about setting up any run-time environment or setting up a substantial build process to make artefacts to support the run-time environment. With something like AWS Lambda, you can literally just copy and paste some function in any of several programming languages into a box on the dashboard, set a couple of details for security etc, and make it live.

sofixa 6y ago

> It's a little concerning that there isn't more consolidation on industry standards for this yet, though. There is, you can run serverless Docker on GCP, AWS and Scaleway at the very least.

Silhouette 6y ago
But as soon as you have Docker involved, you have reintroduced much of the complexity you had running vanilla VMs anyway. Serverless is then little more than an economic decision, something that might be a bit cheaper than maintaining a full-time VM to do whatever it is you're doing, as long as you can tolerate the code start penalty (which is typically greater when using Docker). The main value in serverless, to me at least, is in the ability to write only the actual functionality you need and not care about setting up any run-time environment or setting up a substantial build process to make artefacts to support the run-time environment. With something like AWS Lambda, you can literally just copy and paste some function in any of several programming languages into a box on the dashboard, set a couple of details for security etc, and make it live.