I have to say, at my current company we are using Serverless, and it really does feel like it reduces complexity. No runtime/framework to set up, no uptime monitoring or management required on the application layer, and scaling is essentially solved for us. I mean you do pay for what you get, but it does feel like one of those technologies which really lowers the barrier to entry in terms of being able to release a production web application. In terms of building an MVP, a single developer really can deploy an application without any dev-ops support, and it will serve 10 million users if you manage to get that much traffic.
I'm sure it's not optimal for every case, but for an awful lot of cases it seems pretty darned good, and you can save on dev ops hiring.
I used to be very excited about serverless, and I still have high hopes for it.
But for me it ended up replacing the complexity of runtime and frameworks with the complexity of configuring auxiliary srevices like Gateway API, Amazon VPC, etc. We needed to move the complexity to some tool that configured the services around Lambda, like Terraform or Cloud Formation, or at best to a framework like Claudia or Serverless.com. Configuring it by hand looks fine in tutorials, but is madness: it's still complex, and makes it all way too fragile.
There are however some products that make the experience better by simplifying configuration, like Vercel and Netlify.
Yeah I certainly agree that the complexity doesn't really go away completely, and sometimes it's much more frustrating to have to configure poorly documented services rather than just having access to the host OS.
I guess my overall point would be that two of the hardest things to do in terms of making a production-ready application are scaling and security, and Serverless pretty much obviates them. So it's not a magic wand, but it does take away some of the significant barriers to entry.
Yes, I agree with that point. I think my point was more that Serverless is a good idea, but the current implementations are still not good at removing complexity. But I can see this easily changing, with open standards and the such.
Well, we just need to admit that running applications if ack all know risks are complex.
If we blissfully ignore risks like lamp or lemp stack its much more easier.
Main question do we need to take in account most of risks, running within small scale.
I was expecting writing serverless to be a mess of writing configuration, but I've really enjoyed writing CDK for cloudformation. It's super unclear how you're supposed to write good cdk code, but I feel like I'm a lot clearer on what infrastructure I'm actually using than before, where I was relying on stuff set up by someone else ages ago with minimal to no documentation
I'm sure it's not optimal for every case, but for an awful lot of cases it seems pretty darned good, and you can save on dev ops hiring.