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Comment by wahnfrieden | Hacker News Reader

I don't know (I know) why people aren't moving to platforms like lambda to avoid NIH-ing system security patching operations. We can still run mini monoliths without massive architectural change if we don't get too distracted by FaaS microservice hype

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Why would someone pay per-request when you can have infinite always-warm requests for a flat-rate?

When your workloads are unpredictable and spike suddenly such that you can't scale quickly enough to avoid having a bunch of spare capacity waiting around and have HA requirements. In this scenario more is spent on avoiding variable spend to achieve a "flat" rate

In 20 years of writing software, I have never seen an amount of legitimate influx of traffic that can swamp a whole pool of servers faster than it can scale. I’m not saying it can’t happen, I’ve just not worked on any code or infrastructure that couldn’t keep up with the demands of scale. Is there an industry this regularly happens in where this is a recurring issue?

I write software that a billion users see every day, so maybe I’m jaded by the sheer scale and challenges of writing code at scale that I just can’t imagine these types of problems.

You are looking at your own experiences I guess. In edtech it is common for large classrooms to suddenly come online and do things in tight coordination and no predictive scaling isn’t predictable enough for this problem. You can also look at ecommerce, Black Friday type events to see how capacity planning can easily require runway on spare capacity before scaling can react several minutes in.

Do you think EC2 capacity on AWS is on average kept in high utilization? Everyone runs (non truly elastic resources) with headroom to varying degrees

Ah, yeah, I’m only familiar with the industries I’ve worked in and never worked in edtech. That’s a pretty good example of any industry that gets sudden, unpredictable load.

> I don't know (I know) why people aren't moving to platforms like lambda to avoid NIH-ing system security patching operations.

Perhaps because people do their homework and just by reading the sales brochure they understand that lambdas are only cost-effective as handlers of low-frequency events, and they drag in extra costs by requiring support services to handle basic features like logging, tracing, and even handling basic http requests.

maybe for very predictable workloads. arrogant of you to say adopters haven’t done their homework

> maybe for very predictable workloads.

Predictability has nothing to do with it. Volume is the key factor, specially its impact on cost.

> arrogant of you to say adopters haven’t done their homework

Those who mindlessly advocate lambdas as a blanket solution quite clearly didn't even read the marketing brochure. Otherwise they would be quite aware of how absurd their suggestion is.

ok friend

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