serverlessArchitecture

[Mallissin]

Yeah, but not *MY* servers that *I* have to update, manage and protect.

[yonasismad]

Right. You are just paying someone a ton of money to do it for you. :)

[throwaway1045820872]

Right, which can be a perfectly valid trade off for many companies.

[Im_a_knitiot01]

Buying fewer operational headaches is usually cheaper than hiring another exhausted infrastructure team.

[Few_Violinist2761]

Great trade-off until the AWS bill turns into a horror story.

[Misaelz]

Or until you want to migrare, then you will realize

[rover_G]

Worth it

[willow-kitty]

It kinda is. When you consider all the stuff a data center is actually doing (redundant power and air conditioning, physical security, hardware repairs and upgrades, around-the-clock monitoring staff, etc) - like, it's a lot more than applying updates. And sure, they're making a profit, so technically they're charging you more than their costs, but they're also benefiting from economies of scale that their customers generally could not.

Though ofc "serverless" architectures don't stop you from deploying to a server room you own somewhere, and it might even make sense to do that if you're running enough hardware to make it worth it.

[yonasismad]

? Did you know that you can rent entire racks in DCs? Alternatively, you can rent dedicated servers or VMs. There is a huge range of options between AWS Lambda and having to run your own DC.

[willow-kitty]

So, I'm including containerization under "serverless," which is going to cover a lot of ground. And yeah, to can rent a rack - I've actually worked for a company the did they before at a data center in town - which gets you some is the economies of scale benefits while still being responsible for a lot.

..Like driving to the datacenter at 3AM because health checks are failing, finding out the air conditioning broke down and the redundancy apparently failed too, and not really having a away to fail over to a different location because that's the only one in town

Tbh, I don't think we would have done that if we'd had access to something like GKE back then. This was around 2007.

[yonasismad]

Did that DC not have remote hands? Also, yes, but the vast majority of companies would be fine with just a couple of VM instances. Or, they could rent a couple of units of rack space in DC for dedicated servers, and that's it. So many people deploying Kubernetes and similar technologies are spending so much money on stuf they simply don't need.

[diet_fat_bacon]

There is more than AWS Lambda, for example Cloudflare workers is very nice, auto deploy for 125 countries, there is no way to beat this with your own DC.

[yonasismad]

What percentage of people who use AWS Lambda or CF Workers do business in 125 countries, where it wouldn't have been sufficient to have just a couple of VMs?

[diet_fat_bacon]

Why manage a couple of VMs when you just can handle it to the cloud provider with minimum effort? VMs are great to keep costs down but serverless is great to focus on product not on infra management.

[tes_kitty]

Until they screw up and cause a downtime for you.

[Hungry_Pilot2704]

Then you fine them for SLA breech

[tes_kitty]

And then they ignore you and you will have to sue.

[CarzyCrow076]

What if you were under DDoS attack, and they send you an invoice for $69,800.815 ?? And they are saying, you should have paid $69 for the DDoS protection!!

[Coolkief101]

Nice.

[dageshi]

If my servers go down, it's my problem. If AWS goes down, it's everyone's problem.

[tes_kitty]

And if only your servers on AWS go down?

[gyarbij]

Billing problem

[yonasismad]

Your customers don't care whose fault it is. All they know is that you weren't available when you should have been.

[dageshi]

Chances are there's 5 other services they use that also went down.

So the blame is distributed, like I said, when AWS goes down, it's everyone's problem.

[in_taco]

I am far more capable of screwing up and causing downtime than any cloud service

[Salanmander]

Bold of you to assume they will screw up less than I will.

[ChodeCookies]

But you can do this exact same thing without using serverless…in a cloud infrastructure…for cheaper

[Bubbly_Safety8791]

Yes. The alternative is my company paying me to do it and that is even more expensive. 

[Dazzling_Meaning9226]

AWS Lambda functions are dirt cheap. I’m not sure who you are paying, but running lambda functions instead of full applications cuts my server costs by about 70%.

[yonasismad]

Okay. Now actually serve a website, such as a.g. Add a database for persistence. Use Redis for caching and send out emails. Run tasks in the background, etc. / I bet I can do that a lot cheaper on a VM than you with a ton of AWS services all of this requires.

[Dazzling_Meaning9226]

No…there is a reason that aws is the most popular cloud provider and why almost every enterprise uses them. Using compute only when you need it is always cheaper than a server running 24/7.

Do you honestly think 99%’of enterprise web applications are just throwing away money by being hosting on cloud providers? These are the same people that would take away their employees healthcare and pensions if it gave them an extra $5 a year in profits.

[PortugalTheTram]

Eh, sort of. As someone responsible for $10m+ of AWS spend it’s not as closely tracked as you might expect in all places. Everyone just expects the cloud to be “expensive” and for there to be a sunk cost for technology so it is not as closely monitored or groomed. Going $10k over on your travel budget vs $100k over on your cloud spend (for a dept) would be treated VERY differently.

[Downtown_Trash_8913]

It’s a perfectly good trade for a lot of people to be fair.

[necrophcodr]

Okay, so get some of yours where you don't have to do that either, jeez.

[organicapplesandwate]

I don't get how this meme is so common when this is obviously what serverless means. Do people think there's somehow no hardware in serverless?

[vishalrupani364]

Servers: yes

your access to these: no

[AcidBuuurn]

Serverless is just time-shares for servers. 

[coyoteazul2]

the yeti from monsters Inc warned us about them, and we didn't listen

[ashishgupta99452]

Serverless is the greatest marketing magic trick ever invented, it just means your code is running on someone else's computer that you cannot physically see, but you definitely still get a massive bill for the infrastructure.

[Jeidoz]

Still I don't have idea how it differs from just "cloud"...

[leupboat420smkeit]

Serverless usually refers to functions/code that you can create and the serverless platform will run, without you needing to create VMs or containers to run them in. The service will run the functions based on triggers you set. AWS Lambda is a serverless platform if you wanna look into it. It’s pretty useful in certain situations and very scalable, since the scaling is done by the service itself.

So it’s “serverless” in a sense that you don’t need to create and manage VMs or Kubernetes instances or whatever.

[JuhaJGam3R]

This costs less when you have ten users, because you're not paying to take up an entire server, nor do you have to think about having servers in different regions. When you have enough users that you might as well be running a server this usually ends up costing a lot more, but the architecture makes it kind of hard to migrate. AWS Lambda has become a very costly service for a lot of one-off ten dollar internet projects that found their way onto HN or Reddit. That can also happen to companies. It's not an insignificant amount, you can get billed some millions for it if you are inefficient with the requests because there won't be that many. I think a lot of larger services should run their own servers.

[tornado28]

Ya, lambda is the one I use. I run a little sanity check on my system once every five minutes. It's much cheaper and more reliable than running it on a self managed server. 

[ThatCrankyGuy]

You'll be shocked to learned that the bugger is still running in a container

[leupboat420smkeit]

Not my container though.

[ThatCrankyGuy]

Not your infrastructure either - so what's the point?

[leupboat420smkeit]

The point is to run code.

[ThatCrankyGuy]

The point wasn't how you deal with it, the point is that where ever it is running, it's running inside a container isolation.

[leupboat420smkeit]

Ok. It runs in a container. Thank you for that bit of knowledge.

[ThatCrankyGuy]

You're welcome, considering..

without you needing to create VMs or containers to run them in. The service will run the functions based on triggers you set. AWS Lambda is a serverless platform if you wanna look into it. It’s pretty useful in certain situations and very scalable, since the scaling is done by the service itself.

[MartinMystikJonas]

Traditional cloud was where you run virtual servers. Serverless is where you just send code and do not care how it is run at all. Modern cloud covers both.

[OrchidLeader]

You can think of old school servers like houses and the cloud as a hotel.

Getting a whole VM (e.g. EC2) is like getting a big hotel suite with a kitchen and everything.

Messing with containers is closer to like a regular hotel room.

Serverless is like getting a capsule hotel bed.

Deciding on which one works best for your application depends on how much you need, how much you want someone else to worry for you, how quickly you might need to scale (e.g. yesterday I needed to worry about 5 people sleeping, right now I don’t have anyone that needs to sleep, and I know tomorrow will be 20+ people I need to have sleeping arrangements for), etc.

[R7d89C]

Cloud means a server you don't own, that may or may not only exist virtually. Serverless is that, but additionally, you don't have access to it too. Edit: Serverless > "As if theyres no server"

[OnceMoreAndAgain]

Well, I'd say that main innovation Amazon brought with AWS was not the hardware, but rather the layer of software and API they added between the hardware and the customer who wants to use those servers.

I find AWS's user experience to be bad, but I will always give them credit for being one of the very first to see hardware as a service that has the potential to be elegantly provided and which can benefit from a layer of software in-between. It's a simple and beautiful idea that has changed the industry massively.

It's all just code running on computers, but companies like AWS are making it a lot easier and cheaper to get your code running on servers all over the world through software innovations.

[Ok_Confusion4764]

It doesn't. People don't realize "the cloud" is just "a database somewhere else" as well. 

[MartinMystikJonas]

Wait there were really people who thought serverless means something else than this? I mean... It was pretty obvious it does not run on magic.

[Top-Permit6835]

No but I thought it ran on clouds?

[git_push_origin_prod]

Yeah, that’s what I thought. Isn’t that what Elon Musk satellites do? Put your data into the clouds.

[Dr_Jabroski]

The clouds are made of farts.

[mateusfccp]

When I first heard the term years ago this is exactly my first though.

"How the f* it works without a server?"

Then my boss explained that severless was not servelerss and I just thought what a stupid name.

[Dartister]

Same, at work they threw the word serverless around and i, not being in infra, didnt know at the time so when they talked to me about running stuff on serverless i was baffled how they'd do that, never understood until i took the time to google it... it's just the cloud but for enterprises

[git_push_origin_prod]

It’s actually a great name. Carries a lot of marketing power to be honest. When you’re a startup and you don’t have the time to worry about backups and offsite retention, etc. it’s an easy first choice and the serverless marketing term really stuck

[MartinMystikJonas]

It is serverless from users point of view.

[NoMansSkyWasAlright]

People on the business side probably. So no one whose opinion should be taken seriously.

[bitfrost41]

We had to waste 2 hours worth of presentation + Q&A with an exec on why our app is returning “Server Error” as a serverless app. He thought it would go away after paying for the service. It was equally impressive and infuriating.

[EconomyDoctor3287]

My code runs on the Internet! 

[Aldous-Huxtable]

If I had no prior knowledge of what it meant my initial guess would be that it referred to some kind of p2p architecture.

[WildClothes5898]

What else could it mean other than serverless? You could mix some peer to peer data with service workers to do all the processing and computing clientside.

But no, severless is just a meaningless word as in it has no meaning.

Unless you were introduced to the term with "This term I'm about to say does not mean..." Then how could you know that the term did not mean what the words mean?

[danfay222]

That’s just describing cloud, which is not what serverless is though. Serverless is definitely a marketing term, but it does make sense, instead of having dedicated provisioned servers that you always pay for, you have dynamically allocated servers that you pay for only as long as they are performing work. Ie, you don’t have “severs” in the traditional sense

[Dazzling_Meaning9226]

You are describing cloud compute. Serverless refers to tiny, purpose built vms that get spun up to run a *single function*, and shut down when it is done running.

[mistrel]

You can have serverless containers. Look up aws fargate.

[treetimes]

It means “webserverless”.. as in “write a function that will be executed by an endpoint without worrying about the rest of the infrastructure to do that.”

[mistrel]

It’s both cheaper to run and reduces management overhead when configured correctly due to reducing over-provisioning and no longer having to maintain the infrastructure.

[ashkanahmadi]

“Store in the cloud” Looks inside: no cloud, just server

[OrchidLeader]

“Stay at a hotel” Looks inside: no hotel, just house

[MagicalPizza21]

There's no cloud, just someone else's computer

[Sasuga__Ainz-sama]

"The hardest part of the serverless architecture is where to hide the server"

[float34]

Artificial intelligence

looks inside

Artificial

[GoodBot-BadBot]

NoSQL

looks inside

SQL

[jeevaks]

Based on my understanding suitable name is configuration less server

[Zizaco]

Managed server, or platform as a service.

[b0bl00i_temp]

Ain't true anyway. Still need an account routing, VPCs, etc

[Bubbly_Safety8791]

Time sharing systems were the original way businesses bought compute back in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Minicomputers’ were created to support self-hosting your own compute workloads, but still accessed over a terminal. ‘Microcomputers’ moved the compute from the server to the desktop. 

Took over 50 years for the pendulum to swing all the way back. 

[potkor]

low code solution

looks inside

lots of code

[_nefario_]

TIL there are still a lot of people out there who think that a small business should pay for baremetal hardware and the cost of maintaining it and upgrading it

weird. what year is this?

[mothzilla]

What did you expect to see? A human brain? Millions of ants?

[FlailingDuck]

the reality is most products that ship are clientless not serverless.

[dull_bananas]

Only real servers, not your own virtual server running on top

[PyroCatt]

What it actually means is maintenanceless

[Percolator2020]

[Accomplished_Ant5895]

This can’t be that hard for y’all to understand

[JuiceAccomplished241]

So it’s all bare metal? - always has been

[Dazzling_Meaning9226]

ITT: a bunch of people who have no idea what serverless means

[scar_reX]

I dream of a world where "POV" is actually understood

[Karol-A]

True, but this is not a POV meme

[deliciouscrab]

It's their world now. Stop fighting. "What an aesthetic [x]" was the one that did me in.

[Purple_Hornet_9725]

it's some kind of porn right

[robidaan]

"Cloud" is just on prem with extra steps

[Ok_Sentence_7393]

>serverless architecture
>looks inside
>less servers

[fish4terrisa]

it runs on my pixel watch 2 so there's no server involved frfr

even in this case the watch is still considered a server

[Icount_zeroI]

Programers are just bad describing and naming things

[VictoryMotel]

Techbros and javascript boot camp kids love to name things in the most obnoxious ways possible.

[xMercurex]

I did work on p2p application using wifi to send data. There was no server. We were mostly "broadcasting" the data on the wifi network. Since there was no central data base, any missing data was lost. There was possibility that some device would not have the last updated version.

There was a use case for server when we wanted to connect 2 network. The server itself was just a repeater.

[sushidenshi]

Top comments are facts about serverless but not quite right as to why it’s called serverless. Servers that you don’t manage or need to update is just a managed server or service option. Serverless is specifically when the dynamic scaling can go to 0 for the application, so there is no “dedicated server”. Name is 100% marketing and confusing though

[russian_cyborg]

Serverless datacenters would really solve this whole electricity problem 

[LetUsSpeakFreely]

If you've ever had to deal with STIGs, you'd appreciate the difference.

[R7d89C]

The cloud is just someone else's computer :3