Ask HN: What are some practical uses for serverless? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some practical uses for serverless?

24 pointsbuf16 comments

Long time Rails/Django/Express user here. I've been reading about serverless for about 3 years now and have setup minor apps for fun.

Forgive my lack of imagination, but I'm failing to come up with anything serverless can do better than wiring up a queueing system can do.

Let's take rails + sidekiq for example. Out of the box, I get stats, retries/error handling, a web UI, weights, great debugging remote and local, and enormous community support + years of SO questions to google. Setting up sidekiq + rails is basically a 10 minute operation.

I'm struggling to understand a good use case for serverless. What am I missing?

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I prefer to think of serverless as: events triggering backend processes without needing a user interface.

A very simple example would be receiving emails to a helpdesk address, extracting pertinent information, looking up the user's priority and their system's details, reformatting the information and posting to a helpdesk system's queue.

You have to remember that the term "serverless" is a misnomer, you are using the provider's servers and infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis -- with a significant markup. Of course, that markup is the value of you not having to configure, administer, allocate servers, processes, etc on your own.

Serverless, like most IT, is well suited to some use-cases and not to others. It takes skill and experience to design the optimal solution for any given requirement.

The "markup" depends on your needs. If you have a process to run every hour or so, you're likely saving money and time by not running a full instance.

> Setting up sidekiq + rails is basically a 10 minute operation.

Standing up a toy sidekiq + rails environment for experiments and for tiny projects is a 10 minute operation. Standing one up for large projects, taking care of deployment without breaks, restarting sidekiq without losing jobs, scaling the environment in reaction to traffic, etc. is a lot more work.

Also standing up sidekiq requires managing your backend storage. If you have time and skills for that, great. Otherwise, a managed service may be better.

On top of that, you need to actually deal with system maintenance for all of those components normally. Any managed solution (whether that's serverless, or effectively-close-to-serverless like heroku) may be a good idea.

Right on. I guess I've done it so many times that I hadn't thought about it. I have a medium sized site, about 12 rps, using rails with a bunch of backend operations (it's a social network), so I think I just have rose-tinted glasses on the complexities of doing that.

Other than setup time, are there any other really great reasons to use serverless?

Or, why is serverless so much more popular than heroku (currently)? With heroku, you have a lot more control.

Heroku is a bit pricy, that's probably related.

> Other than setup time,

Not just setup time. Ongoing management time as well.

Queuing works great when you have mostly constant load. Take image resizing, if you size a queue system to handle resizing 10k/images a day it will fall over on the day you get a million. If you use serverless it might cost a few extra bucks but you will not have a capacity problem.

The million at once thing happens more often then you think, take the case where a website gets a new logo. Now you have to redo the watermark on all the images. Or maybe you want to convert your jpg to webp.

You can also use lambdas to process your images on-the-fly as clients request them. We use both pre-process and on-the-fly depending on if we need hashes ahead of time.

I also thought I'd never use it. At some point I realized that Amazon's free tier allows me to execute some minor periodic tasks (like hourly site monitoring, verification that backups have been performed, an easy way to send notifications to myself).

This way, the deployment issue of an application and its maintenance kind of goes away. It's also free, meaning I don't have to spend any more money or pack the code in another server.

Django you say?

Check out Zappa. If your mind isn't blown after you start to grok what it can do, comment here and we can go through it together. It's very cool.

API/backend services, event-based processing (e.g. emails with csv files attached kicking off a workflow), integration (serverless shims for horrible third party APIs), etc.

especially for workflows, lambdas and step functions are very interesting.

As I like to joke, I am a simple liberal arts major...with about 24 years on/off Wall Street. Have been an intermediate user of R seemingly forever. While I find node.js painful, early days still, the capabilities that I have and will have in the near future to improve my Shanghai based professional services business speaks to the power of the technology/framework, whatever you want to call it. Working on a Hugo website and then will move to microservices offerings to clients both as lead generators and new service offerings. I am psyched.

As an aside, I've messed with EC2, and used Linode and DO hosting Dokku and Docker containers. Can't complain as they are excellent service providers. Still not worrying about the server is a g-d send for those who just want to get stuff up.

It's not there yet (so, admittedly not a particularly practical answer to your question) but what I envision it to be in the future is an expansion of the "functions as a service" paradigm: Deploying functions and building blocks without having to worry about plumbing, infrastructure and cross-cutting concerns such as security or logging.

Serverless is a misnomer; what’s important is that it’s provisionless.

That means you won’t have to preallocate (and pay for) resources that will go unused during non-peak load. It enables automatic scaling.

There are plenty of “serverless” offerings for computation, but very few for databases. Without the later, I don’t think it has much value.

Software engineering daily just had a pretty nice discussion on this topic on their last podcast

Apex Ping is a great example.

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