are there real-world, commercial products actually running on """serverless""" architecture?
no matter how much I think about that whole concept, I see no application for it that couldn't be done better, faster and easier with regular tools
no matter how much I think about that whole concept, I see no application for it that couldn't be done better, faster and easier with regular tools
Yeah, thousands I would imagine. The last two companies I have worked at have been 100% serverless or nearly 100%.
> no matter how much I think about that whole concept, I see no application for it that couldn't be done better, faster and easier with regular tools
Considering you have to ask if there are _any_ products running in a serverless environment, I would imagine you need more exposure to the concept before you make such a large judgement on it.
If you can answer (for legal or other reasons you might not be able to): What kind of monthly bills did your setup have and how many req/s did you serve (in lack of a better metric)? It'd also be useful to know average min/max response time if that's something you remember.
I wish that was a good way of evaluating "performance / price" but that's really hard... If someone know a better way to frame the question regarding price, it would be very helpful.
There is more than "raw dollar amount on monthly bill" to account for in cost, as well. For one, there's stability and the toll that takes on both your team and your customers. Not saying non-serverless apps are not stable by nature, but I've now been part of two teams that have seen the same types of benefits and those benefits line up with the "sales pitch" benefits.
For example, you have some background tasks (sending email, processing files, etc). It's very convenient to just push those into a queue and have serverless functions chew through them. They scale to zero, cold start time has no negative impact on the workload, you don't have to worry about k8s resource requests and scaling, etc.
I too am skeptical of using any serverless offering for serving HTTP API's or server-side rendered pages, atleast for non-trivial amounts of traffic. CloudRun can do it but only because it's a thin management layer on k8s/knative and even then networking config for anything other than CloudSQL is tedious (you have to deploy a proxy to access your VPC).
I rather know my configuration and use one big server with the static files on a CDN
https://blog.khanacademy.org/the-original-serverless-archite...