11 ms·

I think that's sort of against the pareto principle. Assuming you have the physical data near the user. Great. But most of these functions then go on to fetch s

I think that's sort of against the pareto principle. Assuming you have the physical data near the user. Great. But most of these functions then go on to fetch stuff from elsewhere with its own delays and problems. Even if S3 or cloudflares equivalent is replicated everywhere there would still be a networking delay and context switch waiting for a response. If performance is THAT important you would be better served with a HUGE machine with a huge cache of the database. That's not something you can do with a FAAS. Other than saying "hello world" fast. I can't think of a proper use case where the performance of FAAS would be realistically better than a dumb monolith. The performance and complexity overheads of FAAS make the case even harder to make.

reilly3000 5y ago
CF’s Durable Objects product which I neglected to mention above attempts to be that huge database and cache. The CAP theorem isn’t violated, it just embraces consistency while relying on the partition tolerance of their POPs and backbone. Their KV store is more about availability. https://blog.cloudflare.com/durable-objects-ga/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/durable-objects-ga/ I don’t disagree that a huge database can handle an astonishing amount of load but at often unreasonable expense. There as many cases where FaaS is dramatically more affordable to run, both in compute cost and ops time. There are others where its costs spiral out of control under load and with dev effort to fit its constrained programming models. Its hard to say its entirely a trendy frivolity when there are many use cases where its the best tool for the job.