I bought into hosting stuff on AWS, specifically on EBS which I assume is meant by a 'serverless' infrastructure, but I don't know crap about it.
Still think it is mostly awesome and the services are solid. But such infrastructure comes with its own caveats.
EBS now bugs me about some 'HealthCheckAuthEnabled'. I don't know what it wants, just that I have limited time to react. Cannot understand the clearly auto-translated text. Still didn't get what it wants from me when I read it in English. I banned the health check from my logs and said where it can get a response from the service I run. I hoped our friendship ended there. Maybe it did and this is some form of retaliation.
The load balancer AWS set up for me now suddenly costs money. And I thought I could just use it to grab the free TLS cert that comes with it... well, the clients pay for the additional costs anyway and I would be surprised if anyone even noticed the price spike. The traffic is minimal but I am surprised it is actually that expensive. I could probably cut the costs in half if I actually had motivation to look through all the settings...
Microsoft just cancelled some features of some online service my colleague works with because they want to market an alternative for their BI solution. Did cost him 3 weeks of work at the minimum. The stuff cannot be ported to an on-premise version.
Hosting your own server is a lot of work and isn't fun. There is still a lot of work to do if you host on something on such an infrastructure.
Somehow the amount of work you have to put into software hasn't decreased. Honestly the main argument for it is that you can give away responsibilities.
edit: Just noticed that EBS probably counts as PaaS instead of serverless. I run "stuff" (very simple functions) on Lambda too, but to think it would replace apps like the article suggested seems a bit much. It has its purpose, but nearly everything I have on Lambda is AWS cloud specific. It comes in handy for Alexa integrations for example. I think the container won this fight to be honest.
This could have been written by me. And for who ever doesn't have time to maintain roles, there is Ansible Galaxy or tons of roles in GitHub, including mine: https://github.com/liv-io
I've looked an Ansible a couple of times, but I always think it looks too verbose, but more than that the way files for the same thing are spread out across multiple folders just makes it seem like there is a steep learning curve. Something like Ansible sounds great, but it feels like learning it would be a chore.
Indeed.
Kind of reminds me of that sayin' about how "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn't exist ..."
Sometimes I think it is a great trick some big players are pulling off, in convincing the world to subsidize their infrastructure costs (and more than that) by using their resources because it is "simpler" or more effective or alternatives are hard, etc ...
... to where the ability to competently setup and maintain those services will vanish, in due time.
(Which, of course would only help to consolidate those -already- running such systems ...)
It's really not that bad. Most of the investment is early on, after that servers just run. I use unattended updates to keep patches coming in while I'm doing other stuff. Updating from a Debian stable repo won't break your stuff.
Still think it is mostly awesome and the services are solid. But such infrastructure comes with its own caveats.
EBS now bugs me about some 'HealthCheckAuthEnabled'. I don't know what it wants, just that I have limited time to react. Cannot understand the clearly auto-translated text. Still didn't get what it wants from me when I read it in English. I banned the health check from my logs and said where it can get a response from the service I run. I hoped our friendship ended there. Maybe it did and this is some form of retaliation.
The load balancer AWS set up for me now suddenly costs money. And I thought I could just use it to grab the free TLS cert that comes with it... well, the clients pay for the additional costs anyway and I would be surprised if anyone even noticed the price spike. The traffic is minimal but I am surprised it is actually that expensive. I could probably cut the costs in half if I actually had motivation to look through all the settings...
Microsoft just cancelled some features of some online service my colleague works with because they want to market an alternative for their BI solution. Did cost him 3 weeks of work at the minimum. The stuff cannot be ported to an on-premise version.
Hosting your own server is a lot of work and isn't fun. There is still a lot of work to do if you host on something on such an infrastructure.
Somehow the amount of work you have to put into software hasn't decreased. Honestly the main argument for it is that you can give away responsibilities.
edit: Just noticed that EBS probably counts as PaaS instead of serverless. I run "stuff" (very simple functions) on Lambda too, but to think it would replace apps like the article suggested seems a bit much. It has its purpose, but nearly everything I have on Lambda is AWS cloud specific. It comes in handy for Alexa integrations for example. I think the container won this fight to be honest.