Ask HN: Why aren't you using serverless computing in production?

6 points by bbrunner 7 years ago | 3 comments

I've seen a ton of write-ups on the benefits of serverless computing (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, etc.) and spent a decent amount of time playing around with the Chalice framework [1] on a couple personal projects. I'm currently debating on adopting it for a new project at my day job, but I've encountered some rough edges that have made me realize that, for all of the positives, there are still a lot of negatives. I was curious what issues other people have experienced and what the dealbreakers ended up being.

So, effectively, I'm asking HN to convince me to not go serverless :)

[0] - https://github.com/aws/chalice

bbrunner 7 years ago |

For the sake of adding to my own discussion, my issues (specific to AWS) were:

1. Installing dependencies became complicated. When Chalice worked, it was great. Certain dependencies (in my case lxml) required a precompiled bundle that someone had thankfully already taken care of packaging.

2. Visibility into the process was poor. It felt hard to get into the system and really introspect it once it was deployed.

3. I felt pushed to other "serverless" solutions within AWS that I wasn't comfortable with. I understand the inherent vendor lock-in with the current serverless offerings, but I felt like I was doubly locked in when e.g. the "best" choice for a db was Amazon Dynamo.

4. Current serverless frameworks feel very minimal. I'm a big fan of both Django (batteries included) and Express (bring everything on your own). The tech that is out there now feels like Express, except that there isn't a lot of extensions to layer on top. You sort of have to cobble your own together still.

5. Lack of Best Practices. I just didn't see a ton of thought leadership on how to do things the right way in a serverless environment. I might have just missed this though.

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Overall, I've come away impressed but I feel like building something entirely on serverless isn't quite as fleshed out as it needs to be yet. I think it's very close though.

mooreds 7 years ago |

So, the arguments I'd give against serverless (and this is dynamic serverless functions like lambda, etc, not serverless PAAS offerings like RDS or S3):

* they tie you to a certain cloud provider (though tooling like the serverless framework can help)

* they force you into the microservices model (and sometimes you should just start with a monolith until you understand the problem space

* they aren't good for running existing applications that are expecting more traditional execution environments

* still rapidly evolving which means that you may run into "bleeding edge" issues

funfunfunction 7 years ago |

1. Most serverless solutions tie you to a cloud provider 2. Difficult to set up CI/CD with decent auditability 3. Hugely overkill for most projects