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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I don’t dispute that serverless deployments are a mess. But I look at it the other way: they make you deal with scaling up front, whether you need it or not. RDS, S3, all that... it scales to huge volumes. Your single VM will not. You can set up auto scaling with multiple VMs but by that point you’re going to be dealing with a lot of the issues you have with serverless deployments.

Now, could a lot of serverless deployments do just fine on a single VM because they never get enough traffic? ...probably. To my mind that's the real problem with serverless: it's a premature optimisation that simply isn't needed in a lot of cases.

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Right, I’m a big fan of the monolith, but that doesn’t preclude anything you just described. Absolutely use RDS. Absolutely use S3. Even on a low traffic app.

But what I see a lot of is engineering teams making sweeping consistency judgements. RDS and S3 are great as services, everything should be a (micro)service. Our calendar feels amazing as a React SPA—everything should be built in React.

No. 90% of a product is just CRUD to support the 10% of magic that customers really value. Ship the 90% as a monolithic CRUD app and spend those cycles on that 10%.

This right here. As a less experienced engineer in the past I once made the unfortunate call to go all in on a JavaScript SPA to replace the simple server rendered rails views because it was “correct” and we should have “modern” code.

It’s been many years since then and all this really did was bloat the client with metric tons of business logic, punch inconsistent holes through the API layer, and cause the entire web product to have abysmal load times (normal is somewhere in the 5 second range IIRC).

I think it’s understated how much damage the young technical leaders typically employed by early stage startups can really do. I can tell you this because I was exactly this person, and I got to see what following hype without doing actual mature research leads to.

This! Lol I even went one step further.. On my monolithic apps I use the language framework mvc or mvvm option. (Currently developing on Asp.net) and only has spa on a complicated page! My productivity has been great. Coming from someone with a background across just about all backend frameworks and working with spas since pre angular 1.0.

While true, I regard that as premature optimization. I think we should stick to something simple until we can measure what kind of workload is needed until we have a good idea of the load we're going to be looking at up front.

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