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As a developer who worked at small to medium sized companies, mainly developing microservices running on Kubernetes, I don't see a big advantage using FaaS as a

As a developer who worked at small to medium sized companies, mainly developing microservices running on Kubernetes, I don't see a big advantage using FaaS as a customer. Maybe I am missing something? I am sure the provider gets more utilization for the hardware, but for the customer what's the point?

sanderjd 3y ago
Isn't it that you don't have to set up and maintain a kubernetes cluster?
- btreecat 3y ago
  Right, you just need a collection of XFaaS services, which need to be hosted somewhere... So you'll want some container orchestration tool, might as well use k8s.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  If setting up a Kubernetes cluster isn't a terrible overhead for us, switching to FaaS would mean we would have more control or less control? I am thinking mainly of migration to another provider. Maybe we would benefit more if we would have large spikes in resource usage, but we don't.
  - jppittma 3y ago
    FaaS is an abstraction over a (several) managed k8s clusters. Like most abstractions, you're trading convenience for power/flexibility.
WJW 3y ago
Most of the companies I've worked for or consulted with had some sort of background worker system for , usually with a queue in postgres/redis/rabbitMQ/kafka/whatever in between. It usually gets used for non-latency sensitive work like sending emails instead of doing that from the main request handler, so that the user gets their response without having to wait for the other stuff to be completed. Bigger companies sometimes have multiple groups of background workers, one for each service and each with their own queues, servers and autoscaling policies. As I understand the XFaaS system from the article it functions a bit like a consolidated background worker system that any service can submit their work to and it will (try to) make sure it gets done in whatever SLO is specified. This is usually cheaper because now you can do low-urgency work from service B when there are urgent jobs from service A and vice versa, leading to higher average server usage. For small/medium businesses this is probably not something you'd want, since developing and operating such a system costs more than you save. But if you have a multi-million dollar bill for your background workers alone then it might be worth it.

sanderjd 3y ago

Isn't it that you don't have to set up and maintain a kubernetes cluster?

btreecat 3y ago
Right, you just need a collection of XFaaS services, which need to be hosted somewhere... So you'll want some container orchestration tool, might as well use k8s.
DeathArrow 3y ago
If setting up a Kubernetes cluster isn't a terrible overhead for us, switching to FaaS would mean we would have more control or less control? I am thinking mainly of migration to another provider. Maybe we would benefit more if we would have large spikes in resource usage, but we don't.
- jppittma 3y ago
  FaaS is an abstraction over a (several) managed k8s clusters. Like most abstractions, you're trading convenience for power/flexibility.

WJW 3y ago

Most of the companies I've worked for or consulted with had some sort of background worker system for , usually with a queue in postgres/redis/rabbitMQ/kafka/whatever in between. It usually gets used for non-latency sensitive work like sending emails instead of doing that from the main request handler, so that the user gets their response without having to wait for the other stuff to be completed. Bigger companies sometimes have multiple groups of background workers, one for each service and each with their own queues, servers and autoscaling policies. As I understand the XFaaS system from the article it functions a bit like a consolidated background worker system that any service can submit their work to and it will (try to) make sure it gets done in whatever SLO is specified. This is usually cheaper because now you can do low-urgency work from service B when there are urgent jobs from service A and vice versa, leading to higher average server usage. For small/medium businesses this is probably not something you'd want, since developing and operating such a system costs more than you save. But if you have a multi-million dollar bill for your background workers alone then it might be worth it.