As a software architect, I hate serverless. Not because it doesn't work, but because it forces design constraints that cripple your application. Here's why always-on servers matter.
It really is such a cool concept. The autism in me hates the name though because there’s always a server. I wish it were called a “container-based service” or even just “containers” instead of serverless to be more direct. Perhaps even “web functions.”
There’s so much big talk about scale but really, scaling is not that important to 99% of businesses I’ve worked at. You’re not a startup. Your typical server has a huge amount of resources if managed appropriately. I guarantee and would bet money that you’ll never have a million users let alone a billion using your medical coding web app. Like, sit down!
Problem is containers mean OCI/Docker containers for most people, which distinctly are little OSs (the kernel is shared), where serverless creates a common OS stack and application framework as well.
Absolutely. People really sleep on just how much traffic a simple low end server running a PHP framework can handle. I’ve ran systems with a million users (combined across multiple domains and clients but still) and it was just fine with a single database server and a few web servers. They would have needed to hit the tens of millions of users before serious refactoring or rewriting would have ever been necessary to consider.
It really is such a cool concept. The autism in me hates the name though because there’s always a server. I wish it were called a “container-based service” or even just “containers” instead of serverless to be more direct. Perhaps even “web functions.”
There’s so much big talk about scale but really, scaling is not that important to 99% of businesses I’ve worked at. You’re not a startup. Your typical server has a huge amount of resources if managed appropriately. I guarantee and would bet money that you’ll never have a million users let alone a billion using your medical coding web app. Like, sit down!
Problem is containers mean OCI/Docker containers for most people, which distinctly are little OSs (the kernel is shared), where serverless creates a common OS stack and application framework as well.
Absolutely. People really sleep on just how much traffic a simple low end server running a PHP framework can handle. I’ve ran systems with a million users (combined across multiple domains and clients but still) and it was just fine with a single database server and a few web servers. They would have needed to hit the tens of millions of users before serious refactoring or rewriting would have ever been necessary to consider.