Not Just About Crows

I didn’t know this, but apparently the twitter user known as @tef_ebooks is all about the crows. Or at least posts lots of pictures about crows. I ran across them for something different.

thinking about that time i was in a meeting with amazon engineers, and my co-workers asked "what's serverless"
i said "per-request, not per-instance billing" and there was an awkward silence like all the hype had been let out of the room

That’s pretty blunt. And accurate. Which is by no means a complaint. Serverless has a lot going for it. Workers can scale quickly. Machine/instance management overhead is cut way down. You get to focus on the business problem and adding value. All good and important things.

But it’s also a recognition that Serverless isn’t a panacea. It doesn’t make the complexity of the problem go away. After all the problem space hasn’t changed, just the solution framework.

By definition it’s stateless, which is just another way of saying “State is someone else’s problem”. Which is great, unless you’re that somebody, in which case it’s still your problem. So you still have to deal with state, whether it’s a database, a set of files/S3 buckets, or something else entirely. And, that state management system needs to either scale to whatever the upstream system can scale to or include a throttling component.

Error handling is still a thing. Maybe you can drop bad requests or errors on the floor and ignore that transaction. But often you can’t. Which leads to retry loops, dead letter boxes, and manual mitigation. All of which are additional state to manage. Often, most of the complexity is actually in how to deal with those off-nominal cases. Note most of the compute, but the complexity.

There are other things. Warmup time per instance. You can set up pre-warmers, but it’s an additional thing. Emergent behavior. The more systems and interaction points, the more likely you are to see something unexpected. Billing surprise. Sure, you can put a cap on concurrency, but didn’t you set this up to remove that cap in the first place?

Even so, Serverless has its place. Not having to worry about managing machines, keeping them up to date, oor dealing with hardware issues has lots of value. In many cases the benefits outweigh the costs. Just don’t blindly assume serverless is the silver bullet. Make an informed decision.