Serverless Doesn't Make Sense

Every time I try serverless it doesn't make any sense to me and just feels kinda of meh.

links from video:

#benawad #serverless ​
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#benawad

[deeves]

“I spent 5 minutes porting over my code and the next 10 weeks configuring API Gateway” ...so painfully accurate

[martinsalamanco]

well my experience with serverless is positive, just like with girls: looks attractive and I'm done in just 5 minutes

[gerbenrampaart]

For image resize you can cache back to S3, most of your images are re-requested a lot in the same formats like list view thumbnails and so on (unless you have an extraordinary use case). After the image conversion, save the file to S3 with the format <md5 of full-size image>_<height>_<width>.png or something and make your lambda look there first. If it hits, it's superfast and cheap. Thanks for the video, very funny and informative.

[pharmokan]

tl;dw: google cloud functions bad, azure bad, cold starts 1s extra, cloudflare workers ok but not for resource intensive funcs, serverless is a meme

[shikharraje]

" a T H I C C Kubernetes cluster" 😂

[julescsv]

The problem people have with new technology is, they want to use new technology like the old technology, that is just not how it works. You also might need to revisit the definition of serverless .

[brzeczyszczykiewicz]

You might be expecting AWS Lambda too be a replacement for a static server but it's not. It's more for handlying async events that you don't needs results for immediately. Sure, you can bend it to pretend it's a replacement for an EC2 instance on a pay as tou go contract but that's not its purpose.

[yankittt]

"10 weeks configuring the API gateway" 😂😂I can relate brother

[koushikshomchoudhury]

I'm using Serverless in production. Sure there are cons, but it is never as bad as some people describe. It has it's own purpose. It is not a replacement but an alternative.

[THEBEST-lhpq]

And 2 years later Ben was right and Amazon Prime moves away from serverless lol

[Coder-zxnb]

"If you know the number of requests why wouldn't you use a server?"
Cost my friend. Serverless is dirt cheap.

[winterbird]

I love how with every video I watch I have 0 idea what I'm clicking into but Ben's meme language just clicks and I come out having learned something in a non-mind-numbing way

[Supersonicboom]

Two points you should consider
1) Provisioned concurrency makes perfect sense even in serverless architectures, because if you have a large complicated application decomposed into 10's if not 100's of lambdas then you can set the provisioning for each in isolation, this saves $$$ over having to scale a monolithic app. As for serverless vs Docker + Kubernetes there is very little difference as serverless is actually using these technologies under the hood, it's just abstracted away from the dev. If you go into the lambda settings you can see you can upload your own docker image to provide your own runtime even.

2) You don't even need to use provisioned concurrency to avoid cold starts in most cases. You can use a heartbeat method to pre warmup the function by hitting the endpoint and having it short-circuit and instantly return in anticipation before you are going to use it. You can even abstract that away using simple middleware to not convolute the function itself.

That is not to say serverless doesn't have it's problems, though each one is something that can be solved once and not have to be thought about again. AWS all the way, as long as you do the leg work to get your infrastructure setup once, repeating the process actually becomes easier than using any 3rd party.

[krabbypattified]

I think you answered your own question. Serverless scales 10x more easily and the only downside (cold starts) can be fully removed with provisioned concurrency.

[Javier_Corado]

Funny how well this aged. Amazon Prime team surely watched this video.

[ciarancallaghan]

Cold starts are not an issue for the most part. Lambda containers will be reused for several hours so a cold start will just be <0.1% of invocations. Just an FYI.

Also scaling is not the only goal for serverless. No managing/maintaining/updating servers, pay for what you use, high availability.

[amiralam]

well i cam here after amazon prime video blog posted about serverless, and yes ben you were right!

[RatherPleasent]

Serverless is pretty good. It's basically microservices with more of a functional aspect. Great for data processing. Also like it more for distributed processes and pub/sub models.

[kumarvishalben]

I usually do the provisional thing, where i call my function every 15 minutes. Cause its only 96 calls per day which is 2880 calls per month of 2 million Free calls per month of gcp functions.
That way my server is completely scalable and warm all the time.

[MDMEN]

My experience with Serverless is actually extremely positive and we use it extensively at my company. However it forces you to take a different approach to doing things otherwise you will find similar struggles as described above.

To give a concrete example to the scenario mentioned in the video: