Is this a sarcastic quip or are you able to expand on this?
I use a lot of serverless daily, handling events (even ML inference), and it seems to work great, but would love to understand the alternatives and your perspective.
The overhead of abstracting away the servers is a luxury in many ways. This extra cost I believe was heavily funded by low-interest rates which flushed the VC world with dough. There’s been a lot less serverless talk since the fed started cranking the rates
Sorry, but this feels like a total non sequitir. Serverless or FaaS is pretty mature now. People get the concept, businesses understand the savings, and the services and tooling are stable. We don't talk about it because it's boring.
Maybe the backend is, but the frontend aspect is very bad
Both GCP and AWS have terrible web UI's for their cloud functions offerings and every deploy is so slow I'm lucky that next monday is a holiday so I can rest from the stress of having to use GCP last friday (on a deadline)
Codesandbox should offer their own serverless functions so I can actually have serverless for the whole development cycle
I've used serverless for the past 3 years in production. Unfortunately my experience with it is that it's several orders of magnitude more expensive than a k3s cluster on a cheap provider like Hetzner, and it's slower.
When I last calculated the cost of serverless, it was ~500-5,000x more expensive for the compute compared to k3s and ~10x more expensive for bandwidth at a minimum. To me, removing the burden of maintaining infra didn't justify that level of cost.
Some examples:
- Upstash latency was ~70ms for Redis. Cost was prohibitive.
- AWS Lambda / Cloudflare Worker / Firebase Function cost becomes prohibitive. At least cold starts aren't as bad as they used to be.
- Firebase Realtime Database performance didn't scale, and wound up getting maxed out because of the way it works with nested key updates. Replaced with a Redis instance in k3s which is now running at <2% max capacity and is ~1,000x cheaper.
- Tried Planetscale. Cost was much higher than PostgreSQL.
- Tried Vercel. Bandwidth costs are very scary ($400 / TB egress, or ~350x the cost of Hetzner if you don't count Hetzner's free 20 TB per node)
That being said, I don't know of any good, reasonably-priced GPU offerings.
I use a lot of serverless daily, handling events (even ML inference), and it seems to work great, but would love to understand the alternatives and your perspective.