Has anybody actually tried to program as these serverless / microservices articles propose ? Having a collection of lambdas orchestrated by infrastructure as code ? I have and the result has always been a complete nightmare… I’m starting to think I’m not actually an idiot doing it wrong, but that I’m being sold snake oil by cloud companies and ex-programmers who now make money writing books and powerpoints for conferences :(
Sadly, yes. Several years ago, started a new job at a "serverless" company. There was a ton of lambdas with massive code duplication everywhere. Nothing could be run locally. I'd see people actually editing code through the AWS console. On top of that, the performance was terrible.
The whole thing could've run on a single low end VM and used RDS for the database. Using a more standard framework, it would've been cheaper, faster, and easier to maintain.
All of my past projects where we implemented these cloud paradigms, didn't need them. There were better options to extract performance and improve scale than going all-in for cloud based migrations.
sure, that OS patch was auto updated, but that vuln in our deps that showed up over the weekend did suck in our time.
We lost productivity, the cloud credits ran out and so did our good folks.
I think it solves a very specific set of problems that most people probably don't have.
For example, if scaling various parts of your application independently is a hard requirement, you're going to want to follow some set of these practices. Otherwise you're probably not going to see any practical benefits relative to the additional complexity.
I inherited a project that was a collection of Lambdas set up with the Serverless framework - there are Lambdas that proxy HTTP requests to other Lambdas plus Lambdas sending messages via SNS to other Lambdas.
Tracing/debugging is difficult, and in many cases something seemingly straight-forward is more complex than it needs to be.
Currently used at my current company. It is a nightmare in terms of development. OTOH it is a nice feeling not needing to worry about servers suddenly going down or some sql query tanking prod, which Id say is the only upside
Have been working with serverless for quite a while now and I love it. It's been really good for our specific set of clients who already have extremely large user bases but zero digital tools. Being able to slowly transition into a digital version of their previously manual product without incurring any substantial infrastructure costs during the transition is extremely valuable to them.
However, Serverless has its flaws. I wrote a post a while back where I talk about the current landscape. It's a bit out of date, but if there's interest I might update it and post it here.
I had to work on an architecture like this for a company that had no business employing such an architecture. It sucked, but in attempting to help people on team "this is good" communicate with team "this is insane, terrible, illegal even?" I ended up probably growing more than anyone on either team.
When life hands you executives with zero accountability, make lemonade I suppose.
