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Comment by abiro | Hacker News Reader

Think about serverless as framework-as-a-service. It has a learning curve, but if you buy in, it is an amazing productivity boost.

(If Reddit’s video hosting being built and operated on a serverless stack by a single a engineer won’t convince you, I don’t know what will.)

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90% of Reddit videos are unwatchable for me : they start OK then the quality is downgraded to something unwatchable and there's nothing I can do about it.

I even tried to download them with youtube-dl but it doesn't work.

100% agreed. The initial buffering time on them is ridiculous. I've started uploading to streamable and just posting that link rather than upload video straight to reddit.

Makes me wonder in how many other [recursive] ways progress is held back by a lack of it.

In 2010 I was 24 yr old and built a myspace clone SaaS with music and video hosting with everything it implies: large uploads, background jobs, compiling an nginx patch to support range requests, ajax to have videos and music playing while browser, with Django on a 20 bucks/month server. If you're not convinced I don't know what will.

I think the point is, with your Django approach, you'll be stuck doing ops work 9-5 once you start getting customers, whereas with serverless you can spend the time to do more feature dev work.

Not quite sure about that, nowadays I require a couple of 20 bucks/month servers to have one CI/staging and one training/production deployments. I'm at the point where I practice CD as in "deploy each git-push to branchname.ci.example.com and run cypress on it" and still am able to deliver in half a day what the customer would expect to happen in two weeks.

And of course, baremetal provides a much better ROI than VMs/VPS/<insert glorified chroot/jail here>.

You seem to have gotten your deployments down and I really think that's good. In my own experience, though, managing your own infra always works well until it doesn't anymore. And when it stops working well, it crashes and burns and sucks up all the time. Going with managed services like serverless helps to get around that.

that sounds cool, what happened to it? that'd be a fun project to work on today :)

I just had no marketing, no partner for that, but I could rebuild that a similar time frame if only I had a plan to make profit out of it. Made it into a local newspapers but that's was the beginning and the end. It's from the times where I was finding musicians in the streets to pay me 50 bucks per website and hosted them on grsecurity hardened gentoo ... which I don't practice at that cost anymore of course. https://www.charentelibre.fr/2010/02/09/article-5-internet-a...

If Reddit video is the poster child then serverless is in big trouble.

That thing almost never works.

They've already ruined React!

Until he leaves and some poor other dev has to dig into his stack

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