The optimistic tone at the start of the article might just be a hallucinatory strawman set up.
But as a probably old dog, I fail to see the allure of these technologies(*).
When I read the copy trying to peddle them, to me it sounds quite like someone saying "Heey.. PSST! Wanna borrow 5000$ in cash, I can give it to you right now! Don't worry about 'interest rates', we'll get back to that LATER".
When I build stuff out of 'serverless', I find it rather difficult to figure out what my operation costs are going to be; I usually learn later through perusing the monthly bills.
I think the main two things I have appreciated(?),
is
(1) that I can publish/update functions on cloud in 1-5 seconds, whereas the older web services I also use, often take 30-120 SECONDS(not minutes, sorry) to 'flip around' for each publish.
(2) I can publish/deploy relatively small units of code with 'functions'.
But again, that is not quite accurate. It's more like 'I need to include less boilerplate' with some code to deploy it.. Because to do anything relevant, I more or less need to publish the same amount of domain/business-logic code as I used to with the older technologies.
Part from that, I mostly see downsides
- my 'function/serverless' code becomes very tied-to-vendor.
- testing a local dev setup is either impossible or convoluted, so I usually end up doing my dev work directly against cloud instances.
I'm probably just old dog, but I much prefer a dev environment that allows me to work on my own laptop, even if the TCP/IP cable is yanked.
Oh yeah, and spit on you too, YAML :-)
They found a curse to match the abomination of "coding in xml languages" of 20 years ago..
They're useful in a small set of behaviors. If you have a particular job that is run infrequently but is burstable, it doesn't make sense to have a server hanging around for just that purpose.
My current employer standardized on serverless and for many things it works well enough, but from my standpoint it's just more expensive.
When I read the copy trying to peddle them, to me it sounds quite like someone saying "Heey.. PSST! Wanna borrow 5000$ in cash, I can give it to you right now! Don't worry about 'interest rates', we'll get back to that LATER".
When I build stuff out of 'serverless', I find it rather difficult to figure out what my operation costs are going to be; I usually learn later through perusing the monthly bills.
I think the main two things I have appreciated(?), is
(1) that I can publish/update functions on cloud in 1-5 seconds, whereas the older web services I also use, often take 30-120 SECONDS(not minutes, sorry) to 'flip around' for each publish.
(2) I can publish/deploy relatively small units of code with 'functions'. But again, that is not quite accurate. It's more like 'I need to include less boilerplate' with some code to deploy it.. Because to do anything relevant, I more or less need to publish the same amount of domain/business-logic code as I used to with the older technologies.
Part from that, I mostly see downsides - my 'function/serverless' code becomes very tied-to-vendor. - testing a local dev setup is either impossible or convoluted, so I usually end up doing my dev work directly against cloud instances.
I'm probably just old dog, but I much prefer a dev environment that allows me to work on my own laptop, even if the TCP/IP cable is yanked.
Oh yeah, and spit on you too, YAML :-) They found a curse to match the abomination of "coding in xml languages" of 20 years ago..