Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by chevman | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

chevman

Shit-ton of .Net running in on-prem corporate environments still.

My guess is this is another carrot to get those workloads migrated kids!

View on HN

With .net core (aka .NET 5+), there is no specific need for serverless to migrate to cloud.

It is easy to deploy .net apps on linux in EC2.

On-prem to Lambdas? Not sure that's going to be a popular migration path.

Depends on the migration path. I would have though the generic directive of "get everything out of the data center and into AWS" would usually start with replicating existing infrastructure, but after the bills start coming in you need to deal with "why aren't we using this more effectively".

That's where the Lambda stuff becomes interesting. A lot of systems don't need a great deal of re-designing to shift workloads to serverless type processing if they are already doing some kind of batch system.

If you need to get out quickly then yes, but if you have a few years there is ample guidance that says 'lift and shift' is a way to really hose yourself in the cloud.

Maybe, though Lambdas are .Net on Linux, which probably means a lot of the existing workloads aren't a straightforward move.

.NET 6 is fairly new and after the .NET Core reunification so I wouldn't say moving to Linux is exactly the complicated part of upgrading legacy .NET apps.

It can be. There’s a bunch of windows-specific and “this was a mistake to build” APIs that aren’t available in modern .NET. And for good reason! The big legacy .NET Framework apps all inevitably use some of them. I got a good taste of this when building the try-convert tool, and that was only focused on converting project files and package references.

Depends on how far you're moving. Already on Core 3.1? Probably not an awful lift. If you're still trying to get off Framework if you are using certain libraries/namespaces (System.Data, WCF, System.Web, System.Addin) there is a lot more pain involved.

The move from 3.1 core to .NET 6 was reasonably painless for me. A few of the setup classes on a web app changed but that was about it. It was much easier than .NET core 2 -> 3.1

What dependencies do you imagine code running in lambdas would have that preclude Linux as a deployment candidate?

I was under the impression most of the Windows-only issues involved GUI frameworks.

Not necessarily lambda candidates but from what I have seen: COM dependency, or native specialised assemblies (in my case math libraries, internal enterprise components that aren’t under development anymore), anything to do with system.drawing. The crypto library is also very integrated with windows, .net core only partially implemented the API.

AFAIK System.Drawing has been separated out adequately in Core?

System.Web is what comes to mind as a potential problem for a move like this, though.

The TCP and socket APIs have significantly different async behavior. Double that if you want to cancel anything.

(That's the first thing I tried cross-platform. So maybe just my bad luck, but I have doubts everything will work smoothly.)

Here's my experience as a consultant who has worked with several .Net shops:

A significant percentage of .Net teams (in more enterprisey companies) have tech teams who haven't seen anything other than Windows. Deploying on Linux gets shot down in meetings by senior decision-making folks who again have seen only Windows. It's a bit of self-preservation, plus fear of the unknown.

>What dependencies do you imagine code running in lambdas would have that preclude Linux as a deployment candidate?

The context was "Shit-ton of .Net running in on-prem corporate environments still", not code already running in a Lambda. There are plenty of Windows dependencies/assumptions that are not GUI code. Porting a .Net service, for example, which would be pretty common. And just lots of mundane stuff that's still work, like logging, file locations, etc.

They're definitely competing with Azure on this front.

If you're somehow still running C# on-prem (last time for me was >5 years ago?) you're probably less likely to go AWS than Azure if anything.

I agree. Even if these orgs aren't using (on-prem) FaaS solutions today that doesn't mean it doesn't still sell them on the cloud.

A car salesperson has sold the car once the customer begins fantasizing about their lives inside the new car.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com