DigitalOcean’s quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud
digitalocean.com
digitalocean.com
I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue because 1) it clearly communicates what it is 2) there's not actually such thing as serverless since the functions are still running on servers. It's a made up term that isn't grounded in reality. It's not serverless any more than a Heroku Dyno is Serverless.
The first time I heard "serverless" I assumed it was a totally in-browser application.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) - a product such as GitHub or Slack
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - VM or LB as you find in Azure or AWS or Digital Ocean
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - sometimes called Container as a Service as you find in Heroku or Zeit Now
- Function as as Service (FaaS) - a single function as you find in Lambda
Practically CaaS tends to be PaaS, because the hosting service is also providing a platform such as Kubernetes.
The only interface is the input into the function and the output it returns.
But "Functions as a Service" doesn't cover what it is, though.
The following AWS services are "serverless" but would not be "function as a service:"
* S3
* API Gateway
* SQS
* SNS
* Cognito
* DynamoDB
* CloudWatch (logs and metrics)
* Step Functions
In all cases, you are not provisioning or managing servers. Scaling is linear and costs are linear based on how much you use them, and typically based on what's actually being used (bytes stored, requests made, etc.) and not per-node. Because they're all hugely multi-tenant, they also cost almost nothing to use at low scale.
"Functions as a service" covers serverless compute, but it doesn't cover the huge architectural difference (from the developer's perspective) between the services above and rolling your own (for example) S3.
If we're qualifying anything on a server that developers don't have to manage themselves as serverless than anything with an API becomes serverless...despite all of them actually running on servers.
"Serverless" can be applied to every SaaS product ever made and is just an all-around meaningless and dumb-sounding term.
The distinction I've heard and make (regardless of serverless being the right term) is that these infrastructure services expose their control plane and data plane without tying you to the concept of a particular machine. Compare this to all publicly available forms of RDS where I still have to think in terms of machines for scaling and management.
What's really the difference between FaaS and Erlang style message passing?
So the term "serverless" made you think there was no server involved? What could have possibly made you think that?
"Serverless" is up there with "cloud" for the dumbest most overused words in technology right now.
If 100% of the servers were running PHP, the results would likely be 50% PHP, 50% JavaScript.
These survey writers need to modify their question, or add another one specifically requesting server-side tech so JS can be accurately compared with server-side only languages.
I get your point, but they probably asked “what language do you develop with”.
By the way it's worded, it sounds like the question is specifically talking about NodeJS.
Hold my beer. --Frontend developers
Once the container's done building, throw it out, take what it built, and serve it.
I'd personally do this separately from the rest of the web app if possible, though. I keep frontends in their own repository.
IMO this is more from asking for specific combinations of skills used at a company than anything else. You need these two programming languages, this database, this frontend framework, these devops tools and these other skills would also be beneficial.
Generally, you're better off hiring as "if you are competent with one of these and willing to learn the others, you should apply". The broader the stack the more learning curve should be assumed with the hiring process.
But it's not in a lot of cases. This also goes hand in hand with the professional development opportunities cited at the beginning of for retention sake.
This kinds of people are hard to find. It’s a terrible business decision not to pay them well because their ROI is multiple times their salaries.
They are also very rarely on the market sending out resumes. Mostly because they get jobs mostly via friends of friends and referrals.
But I do agree a 100%, we should be getting paid more. If you’re not getting paid enough, look for other opportunities. There are plenty.
The tech industry has never been as profitable as it is now. We are in a huge tech boom right now. AppAmaGoogMsft are all poised to be the first trillion dollar corporations.
Remember when VMs came out, and people were like, great! Now I can constrain the resources of my OS! I can run 10 OSes on one machine! I'll save so much money !
Then we gave individual teams access to create as many VMs as they wanted, and suddenly all the hardware was used up.
Now do that, but in the cloud, with unlimited resources.
(until the bill comes)
Example: I now need a minimum of 4GB RAM to browse the web, which is insane. 15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at approximately the same rate.
It's not that everyone should always strive to have the minimum footprint possible. It's that no one cares how big the maximum footprint can be.
(This is, btw, one of the cornerstones of CI/CD. Show people the consequences immediately and their behavior will shift. I've seen this firsthand a number of times.)
You can also buy a basic bed that's pretty nice and reasonably cheap.
15 years ago, you might have had a high-tech bed that didn't leave you sore in the morning.
1,500 years ago you had a bed of straw with fleas and bedbugs, but at least you had a place to sleep.
150,000 years you slept in furs on dirt by the fire, breathing smoke and aggravating your sciatica. Your bed was basically free, but since your livelihood depended on your full mobility, sleeping there was slowly killing you.
All these beds provided the feature of "sleep." So why would anybody need a sleep-o-matic, a bed worth more in 150,000 BC dollars than the yearly economic output of your continent? Why should we accept the massive waste of resources it represents?
You probably weren't; perceptions of speed are often based on expectations set by experience, and your expectations were probably a lot lower then. If you actually could go back and browse the web of 15 years ago and the sites you could then, you would be disappointed, but the speed then was similar scaled to the expectations you had then as the speed now is scaled to your current t expectations. So your perception of the speed is similar.
Pre-tabs I probably had only 40 windows open at a time.
The newer Firefox Quantum releases are coming close, but even then it's on a quad-core Core i7 2.8Ghz and 16GB of memory MacBook Pro.
While Kubernetes was most popular overall, the smallest companies (1-5 employees) use Docker Swarm more often (41 percent use Swarm vs. 31 percent that use Kubernetes).
Did not know Swarm was this popular. Even overall Swarm is 35% to K8s 42%
However, there is a huge proliferation of hosted K8s services - AWS, GCP, Azure, Digitalocean, tons of others. Nobody seems to be making a hosted Docker Swarm solution though. I wonder why - is it because the market doesnt exist because of the simplicity of Swarm itself ? Would be interesting to find out.
They built the ability the launch k8s clusters through the docker tool. There are almost no tweets or posts about Swarm instead, their blog is full of kubernetes posts (https://blog.docker.com/). Even their coolhacks section is about "kubeflow". Top rated session at Dockercon was kubernetes.
i really hope they open up more and talk about their future plans and engage with the community.
this is what is scaring us. We love Swarm and really respect all the dev efforts... but the corporate K8s bias in unmistakable. These are some of the kubernetes posts over the last 2 days from Docker's twitter account: https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1016340701800431618
https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015620961712967681
https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015535938678738950
https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015475755428597760
Number of Swarm posts in the same time ? Zero. In fact, I would be hard pressed to find a public tweet about Swarm in a long time.
This was the first Docker event in Lahore - https://events.docker.com/events/details/docker-lahore-prese...
Its Kubernetes everywhere.
[1] https://www.bretfisher.com/is-swarm-dead-answered-by-a-docke... from https://forums.docker.com/t/is-there-a-roadmap-for-docker-sw...
Even today a big PR was pulled in to improve the scalability of Swarm https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/37372
More updates here https://github.com/docker/swarmkit/issues/2665#issuecomment-...
I think the Kubernetes and Swarm devs have generally leveraged IPVS as the next step from iptables. Any thoughts on going straight to BPF ?
I wonder if a similar survey from the bigger players would have different results.
I normally ask questions about various non-tech topics including conflict resolution, team makeup, strategy, product management priorities, how they mentor junior team members, etc. Those discussions may not be able to tell the difference between a good vs. great leader, but they absolutely will raise red flags from a bad leader.
Granted one time I did pass after an interview after talking to an inexperienced manager who had no clue....so sometimes, you can tell.
"the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between bootcamp vs. college graduates"
While the bulk of work at a lot of enterprises (banks, telcos, etc) are CRUD apps with some BPM, I did not expect a (hiring) manager to be unable to make such a simple distinction.
Hopefully it could be the case that 'we don't discriminate based on that' is simply the polite/legal thing to say, especially considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...
Since the industry norm is "You're all equally worthless until proven otherwise" I don't find it all that surprising. They'll take in your resume and toss you into the pipeline / grinder and if make it through the crucible unscathed, well, congrats you'll get a job offer!
Being neither a college nor a bootcamp graduate, I've found very few places give a damn what you've got framed on your wall at home. What matters is if you can hack it in the real world. The only time I've been turned away for lack of credential was Booz Allen Hamilton, and they exist to arbitrage you to the government which still seems to care about proper documents.
> considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...
Well, that would mean 52% surveyed have hired a bootcamp graduate which is pretty surprising to me, personally, since the camp(s) in my metro seem to produce about two good candidates per cycle.
Several of my most promising mentees came out of code camps. It convinces me of something I already 'knew': that good instincts don't come from a college education, they come from life. But a university will weed out a lot of dilettantes...
Seems like this survey was highly self selective, so I'd take the entire thing with a grain of salt. There's no way the industry as a whole is anywhere near 96% male.
What do you think is the correct percentage? 96% seems reasonably close to the anecdotal gender ratio (~1/35 students being female) of undergrads from when I was in university a long time ago.
If that is fair, I wonder how biased these results are. If we included FAANG and/or big corporations where tech is key but not a cultural staple (e.g. Walmart) I wonder what the results would look like.
If so, that'd certainly influence the results a lot, and alongside your examples of FAANG employees and large enterprises, make the survey seem a bit too biased to be all that useful.
Keeps growing. IMO the biggest gap for them is lack of a database service like RDS. There are providers of that service that can be deployed to DO...but the cost of those providers is high enough to disincentivize the price appeal of DO in the first place.
It would be really interesting to see them partner with a known player like Citus.
On your point about database services, I was able to set up Postgres on my droplet with relative ease and it has been serving me well ever since, again all thanks to clear and well made tutorials. I think if I could do it without any prior experience, most other people can too. So IMO, these providers aren't necessary at all.
Eventually they were acquired by Rackspace and folded into the Cloud Servers line.
Great company though.
Wow. Can this really be true? Maybe strictly a web dev thing?
- Javascript 57% use vs 71.5% I had always thought JS was high on the Stackoverflow survey because it included people using it on the frontend. Not necessarily the case.
- PHP was third at 36%
- Golang was fourth above Java
Also, if they are only polling developers are these actually production loads ?
Are the developers now doing operational tasks ?
26% were in companies of 5 or less people and 50% in companies of 25 or less. So, this is highly skewed towards smaller scale companies.
Also, unlike stackoverflow, if the respondents were DigitalOcean users I would imagine some things would be considerably skewed - for instance the popularity of "Serverless". I assume that since DigitalOcean doesn't offer serverless products people who use serverless aren't on DigitalOcean.