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I'm not following. Virtual servers are just as much pure OPEX as serverless. So from the customer accounting perspective, I don't think serverless adds much. I
by wpietri 5y ago
I'm not following. Virtual servers are just as much pure OPEX as serverless. So from the customer accounting perspective, I don't think serverless adds much.
Instead I think the promise is, "Don't worry your pretty little heads about what code is running where. Trust us to handle that!" Which surely seems seductive until people realized that they still have to think about those things.
I heard about one project where consultants decided to use the sparkletastic magic of AWS Lambda so they didn't have to worry about how to scale up their crawler. But they didn't really think it through, so they just had a zillion invocations sitting around waiting for HTTP responses. First-month bill was $12k when you could have spent ~$100 to get the same results with a low-end virtual server running a basic Scrapy setup. So for Amazon I think it's less about filling in a utilization gap and more about attracting people who don't know how to optimize.
- abstract_put 5y agoI'm guessing OP was referring to serverless vs on-prem? I don't think public cloud is significantly different than serverless in terms of CAPEX vs OPEX, whereas private cloud is big CAPEX.
- wpietri 5y agoSure, but is that a versus that comes up much? It seems to me they're orthogonal. You can do on-prem serverless, after all.
- Melkman 5y agoPrivate cloud can be big Apex. Doesn't have to be though. The IBM's an HPE's of this world are perfectly happy to sell you PAYGO on prem solutions. Or you can lease the hardware.
- alexvoda 5y agoServerless is further towards the OPEX end of the axis because OPEX is generated and then payd whereas CAPEX needs approval first. With serverless you no longer need to request approval for new instances. The harder the management believes IT to be a cost centre the harder IT will try to wrestle control away. The story of On prem vs Cloud is the story of CAPEX vs OPEX is the story of expenditure aprooval friction. Sad.
- subw00f 5y agoWhat kind of AWS consultants don't know how to set reserved concurrency? That's one of the most basic things about Lambda, I guess the same goes for any other FaaS providers.
- wpietri 5y agoThey weren't AWS consultants specifically, just a couple of general software consultants fronting a contract development team. And if they had set a concurrency max, the system would have failed in a different way. Using Lambda at all was the problem here.