I don’t think anybody advocates for rewriting all existing projects as serverless. But if you’re starting a startup, going all in on serverless will let you deliver better products faster. If Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages would be written today, the secret weapon would be serverless, not Lisp.
> going all in on serverless will let you deliver better products faster
Can you show some empirical evidence that supports this? In my experience this is another nebulous serverless hype claim that doesn't withstand scrutiny.
I don’t think it’s possible to produce empirical evidence to prove or disprove this claim, but it’s just common sense:
Using managed services leads to writing less code and minimizing devops work, both resulting in more time for feature development that takes less time overall and produces higher quality service (latency, availability, etc). Then there is the added benefit of clear financial insight into the inner workings of the application (one can trace capital flows through functions) which will result in better resource allocation decisions.
No. There's nothing common sense about it. It only seems plausible if you read the sales brochure from a cloud vendor and have no experience with all the weird and whacky failure modes of these systems and the fact that none of the major selling points of serverless actually work as advertised unless you dedicate significant engineering time to make them work - as the GP comment has demonstrated. The amount of engineering time required to make serverless work quickly catches up to or even exceeds just doing the damn thing the normal way.
And that engineering time is not transferable to any other cloud vendor, and neither is your solution now. So congratulations you just locked your business in.
Serverless only makes sense if you have a fairly trivial problem and operate on really narrow margins where you need your infra and associated costs to scale up/down infinitely.
> Serverless only makes sense if you have a fairly trivial problem
That’s exactly the point. The web application needs of most startups are fairly trivial and best supported by a serverless stack. Put it another way: If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago, then it’s serverless today.
If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled.
As a side note, I've learned that the existence of a large number of viable ways to accomplish a task is a pretty big anti-signal for the desirability of accomplishing that task in the first place. When I started my career in 2000, there was a huge debate over whether the "right" way to develop a desktop application was MFC or .NET or Java or Visual Basic or Qt or WxWindows. The real answer was "don't develop desktop apps, because the web's about to take over". When the big web 2.0 businesses were founded from 2005-2011, there were basically two viable options for building a webapp: Rails or Django. Now that everyone's arguing about microservices vs. Docker vs. Kubernetes vs. serverless vs. Beanstalk vs. Heroku, it's likely that the real answer is "develop a blockchain app instead".
> If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled.
That's... not true. The choice of web stack – and, in fact, the whole software – is just a piece of what a startup may need.
Seriously, look at the list of YC startups on 2018 and tell me if most couldn't use either something like Rails, or a Single Page App In React With A Serverless Backend. And it wouldn't matter one bit.
> Using managed services leads to writing less code and minimizing devops work, both resulting in more time for feature development that takes less time overall and produces higher quality service (latency, availability, etc).
Well, not necessarily? This assumes that the implementation is sound but it is not at all uncommon for abstractions to leak which end up causing more pain than they solve
Is there really that much hype? I feel like I haven't heard that much. Serverless isn't even really much of a new thing, there have always been providers that hid the underlying aspects of running a web site on the internet. I think for most people they just don't want to have to worry about patching a machine, rolling logs, watching disk space, etc, if they don't need to.
I will argue the opposite. Startups take on enough risks as it is. Unless your startup requires or is about a novel architecture. Why add more risks with non battle hardened technology.
Software professionals often sees benefits without understanding the tradeoffs.
Large scale reliable systems are antinomic with “launching a startup”. You’re going to go through 2 or 3 pivots and as many refactors, large scale is the last thing you want to optimize for.
