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Why is spinning up new infrastructure wrong when that infrastructure is consumption based and easy to create? Cloud providers don’t care about your serverless

Why is spinning up new infrastructure wrong when that infrastructure is consumption based and easy to create? Cloud providers don’t care about your serverless function utilization for 95% of people. A huge chunk of people will never pay more than a single digit serverless bill, regardless of if they have 450 lambdas or 40. If creating a new function matches your mental model of how things works, simplifies ops and log reading, or gives you access to a library in a different language, I’d say you made a great call.

lozenge 3y ago
Sure, creating is easy, what about monitoring, testing, rate limiting, updating (it can't be atomically updated with another resource, good luck testing that), security patching? What if you create a condition which causes an infinite loop of invocations? This is really rare in monoliths because we all agree on patterns like MVC that determine who calls what. When Conway s Law determines your infrastructure this is no longer the case.
- rajamaka 3y ago
  I have worked with serverless for years and all of these are ranging from completely non issues to easily solvable.
  - namaria 3y ago
    "I haven't had this problem therefore it doesn't exist."
    - nostrebored 3y ago
      All of the problems the OP mentioned are really trivial with every serverless stack I’ve ever used. Like many of the problems (security patching, monitoring, logging) are part of the serverless pitch.
      - namaria 3y ago
        Yes cloud services make it trivial to set up and run software offerings. They are designed so it is easy to enter and hard to leave. And they make things unnecessarily complicated and expensive over if it grows to any non trivial degree. By then you're stuck rationalizing your previous choice because it would be very costly and complicated to move away. I'm glad you haven't had these problems, but it doesn't mean they don't exist. The issue is, when you have one of these 'good to have' scaling problems after going all in on cloud vendor hype, it's too late. So random internet strangers who have seen the issues that lie ahead try to warn other people. Some will arrogantly say they see no problem, full steam ahead. That'll just mean they will have only themselves to blame if they ever find themselves in this quagmire.

lozenge 3y ago

Sure, creating is easy, what about monitoring, testing, rate limiting, updating (it can't be atomically updated with another resource, good luck testing that), security patching? What if you create a condition which causes an infinite loop of invocations? This is really rare in monoliths because we all agree on patterns like MVC that determine who calls what. When Conway s Law determines your infrastructure this is no longer the case.

rajamaka 3y ago
I have worked with serverless for years and all of these are ranging from completely non issues to easily solvable.
- namaria 3y ago
  "I haven't had this problem therefore it doesn't exist."
  - nostrebored 3y ago
    All of the problems the OP mentioned are really trivial with every serverless stack I’ve ever used. Like many of the problems (security patching, monitoring, logging) are part of the serverless pitch.
    - namaria 3y ago
      Yes cloud services make it trivial to set up and run software offerings. They are designed so it is easy to enter and hard to leave. And they make things unnecessarily complicated and expensive over if it grows to any non trivial degree. By then you're stuck rationalizing your previous choice because it would be very costly and complicated to move away. I'm glad you haven't had these problems, but it doesn't mean they don't exist. The issue is, when you have one of these 'good to have' scaling problems after going all in on cloud vendor hype, it's too late. So random internet strangers who have seen the issues that lie ahead try to warn other people. Some will arrogantly say they see no problem, full steam ahead. That'll just mean they will have only themselves to blame if they ever find themselves in this quagmire.