I knew a kid in high school who’s family had spent some time living in a van. I guess the kid had an ongoing joke that they ended up in the van because his dad refused to learn java. Kinda funny, kinda sad. Couldn’t help but think of that when I saw this.
That’s because the new one is just the existing web app that loads inside an Edge instance so they were basically starting from scratch. I realized that when I discovered I couldn’t open the new version on my laptop that I had uninstalled Edge from.
I ran up like a $5k bill over a couple weeks by having an application log in a hot loop when it got disconnected from another service in the same cluster. When I wrote that code, I expected the warnings to eventually get hooked up to page us to let us know that something was broken.
Turns out, disconnections happen regularly because ingress connections have like a 30 minute timeout by default. So it would time out, emit like 5 GB of logs before Kubernetes noticed the container was unhealthy and restarted it, rinse and repeat.
I know $5k is chump change at enterprise scale, but this was at a small scale startup during the initial development phase, so it was definitely noticed. Fortunately, the only thing that happened to me was some good-natured ribbing.
Years ago I was told that serverless would be cheaper than running your own servers. It seems like it’s not necessarily cheaper, but just a different way of designing a solution. Would you agree with that assessment? I have never used serverless. Every place I’ve worked needed tightly controlled data so on premises only.
Meanwhile I host my personal website on dirt cheap VPS.
The thing with serverless is you’re paying for iowait. In a regular server, like an EC2 or Fargate instance, when one thread is waiting for a reply from a disk or network operation the server can do something else. With serverless you only have one thread so you’re paying for this time even though it’s not actually using any CPU.
While you’re paying for that time you can bet that CPU thread is busy servicing some other customer and also charging them.
I like serverless for it’s general reliability, it’s one less thing to worry about, and it is cheap when you start out thanks to generous free tiers, at scale it’s a more complex answer as whether it is good value or not.
Therefore, would you agree that serverless is more about freeing up your mind as a developer and reducing your number of concerns where possible rather than necessarily cost savings or scaling?
In other words, is it less about better scaling and more about scaling isn’t your problem?
It’s cheaper if you don’t have constant load as you are only paying for resources you are actively using. Once you have constant load, you are paying a premium for flexibility you don’t need.
For example, I did a cost estimate of porting one of our high volume, high compute services to an event-driven, serverless architecture and it would be literally millions of dollars a month vs $10,000s a month rolling our own solution with EC2 or ECS instances.
Of course, self hosting in our own data center is even cheaper, where we can buy and run new hardware that we can run for years for a fraction of the cost of even the most cost-effective cloud solutions, as long as you have the people to maintain it.
It was $5k worth of training, and well worth it, since you still remember the lesson.
Reminds me of an issue while carrier-testing a to-be-released smartphone. The third party hired to do this testing would sideload an app to run the tests, but it would try to do something hinky in the background with logging, leading to an infinite retry loop for opening a nonexistent file, effectively doubling the device’s power consumption.
“hey we really need to launch that project by 9am IST, can you please monitor the rollout and fix any issues that arise? Also please have a full report for the daily standup that morning here. CEO will be in the meeting. And no overtime, budget is tight.”
Underrated. It’s important to communicate that the parameters of the request cannot be satisfied as soon as possible. It might be a simple mistake from someone without a technical background who should instead be finding more resources first.
“please use our spyware so we can syphon more of your personal info to get more quarterly profit… We are begging you. See how many apps we have for mail?”
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