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> in the future, 100% of the code that you write will be business logic The present reality of Lambda is quite different though. Even though the code of the fu

> in the future, 100% of the code that you write will be business logic The present reality of Lambda is quite different though. Even though the code of the function itself is more or less "business logic" (although this is a really meaningless term when we're talking about known programming languages and computers), the scaffolding around it with Terraform/CloudFormation/Serverless/etc. is substantial, riddled with quirks and is really time-consuming to figure out and update. I don't think I spend less time on this accidental complexity now when we have most of our logic in Lambda, compared to the times when we were just running Flask apps in a VM. This is not to mention how hard one has to fight to overcome the limitations of the runtime, e.g. adding some "warmers" scripts to reduce cold-start latency (no, provisioned concurrency doesn't help and is ridiculously expensive). And then comes the bill after you accidentally created invocation loop between two functions.

mark242 5y ago
Of course -- you're still writing code to delete a key in Elasticache within your lambda. You're writing yaml code for deployments. Hence the "in the future" portion of this slide. The scale-to-X and scale-to-zero features of Lambda, along with the guaranteed interface to your lambda with predictable input and output requirements, is incredibly empowering for an engineering team. I can absolutely guarantee that we have spent far, far, far less time maintaining our infrastructure than what we would need to be doing if we had a big-buncha-EC2 setup. Imagine that the environment issues get taken care of, because Amazon has teams and teams and teams of engineers who are working on just that. Cloudflare has the zero-cold-start isolates. All these platforms are heavily invested in making your development and deployment experience as easy as it can be. Concentrate on writing your code, and you'll reap the benefits.

mark242 5y ago

Of course -- you're still writing code to delete a key in Elasticache within your lambda. You're writing yaml code for deployments. Hence the "in the future" portion of this slide. The scale-to-X and scale-to-zero features of Lambda, along with the guaranteed interface to your lambda with predictable input and output requirements, is incredibly empowering for an engineering team. I can absolutely guarantee that we have spent far, far, far less time maintaining our infrastructure than what we would need to be doing if we had a big-buncha-EC2 setup. Imagine that the environment issues get taken care of, because Amazon has teams and teams and teams of engineers who are working on just that. Cloudflare has the zero-cold-start isolates. All these platforms are heavily invested in making your development and deployment experience as easy as it can be. Concentrate on writing your code, and you'll reap the benefits.