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I appreciate that many people have reservations about hyper-focusing on product development and utilising the serverless ecosystem. I understand that it may app
by ed_blackburn 2y ago
I appreciate that many people have reservations about hyper-focusing on product development and utilising the serverless ecosystem. I understand that it may appear working with coarser primitives is constraining and unproductive, and for unfamiliar practitioners, like anything else, there's a learning curve. Having been involved in three startups that adopted the AWS serverless mantra, I've come to argue in its favour.
Serverless architectures require designs that accommodate these constraints upfront, and there's a learning curve to finding the best primitives to adopt. It's akin to building with Lego rather than a 3D printer—you're working within predefined limits. Once you understand the optimal patterns for utilising these constraints, they become guardrails that reduce development and operational costs over time.
In my experience, the bar for requiring "always on" is higher than we might realise. Also, the choice between serverless and traditional elastic computing models isn't always binary. Excellent options like AWS Fargate serve as a practical middle ground.
Of course, this approach is only sometimes applicable. There might be a tipping point where it might make sense to consider renting servers with more traditional hosting solutions. Is optimising operational costs by investing capital in rented or physical infrastructure a strategic decision post-startup?
- Archelaos 2y ago> Once you understand the optimal patterns Do you have some recommendations where to start studying such patterns? I am a bit overwhelmed by all the possibilities and (cost) dangers of cloud computing.
- ed_blackburn 2y agoI've started reading this book and I rate it highly so far: Serverless Development on AWS [0]. I agree that finding comprehensive, non-sales-oriented best practices can be challenging. One useful resource is Serverless Land from AWS [1], which offers a collection of practical examples and articles. Mastering serverless involves more than just wiring up functions—it's about adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles. Over time, you'll develop reusable patterns and tools like Terraform modules that encapsulate best practices such as asynchronous Lambdas with EventBridge subscriptions, SQS Dead Letter Queues (DLQ), and appropriate error handling configurations. For a deeper dive into the Serverless philosophy explicitly applied to AWS, I recommend checking out Yan Cui's blog [2]. Yan provides insightful articles on serverless architectures and patterns. I suggest exploring the Reactive Manifesto [3] for principles and best practices in building responsive, scalable systems if you're interested in asynchronous messaging patterns. [0] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/serverless-development-on/9781098141929/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/serverless-development-... [1] https://serverlessland.com https://serverlessland.com [2] https://theburningmonk.com https://theburningmonk.com [3] https://www.reactivemanifesto.org https://www.reactivemanifesto.org
- financltravsty 2y agoHaving become an "expert" in Serverless: I hate it. I would rather stick with EC2s at this point.
- emestifs 2y agoCan you explain more? I'm very interested in what you have to say about serverless.
- financltravsty 2y agoMy frenetic reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40193356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40193356
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoIs there a self-hosted serverless program that works well for learning in a safe environment? Yeah, I get the contradiction - I mean, Minio is to Amazon S3 as this thing would be to Amazon Lambda. I've done cool things with serverless functions before, but never at scale.
- erikerikson 2y agoKNative?
- ed_blackburn 2y agoDefeats the purpose in my view, but to answer your question check out Openfaas or explore Erlang, much if the serverless architecture is Actors forced into Cloud Native primitives. The Holy Grail in my view are actors without knowing or caring how they map to princesses.