
We Made the Whole Company “Serverless” - cddotdotslash
https://medium.com/@CloudSploit/we-made-the-whole-company-serverless-5a91c27cd8c4
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spotman
Tldr, we were worried about running out of disk space, and setting up
distributed logging is hard. So we decided to shoe horn our JavaScript app
into lambada and justified it because some thought was put into how much
effort it would be to undo this one day.

The author also touches on price and at their scale is saving money, and
recognizes that one point will come where it's actually more expensive, but
doesn't want to care about that because "infinite scale" is too cool.

From the article: > While there is certainly an argument for calculating the
exact point at which EC2 vs API Gateway and Lambda is more cost effective, we
believe that the latter’s ability to scale “infinitely” almost immediately
makes it worthwhile.

The takeaway here is that if you don't have time for operations and you don't
have a lot of traffic you can pay someone else to worry about this.

Finally one of the reasons the author lists is that they don't want to have to
setup logging ( which is hard to get right, I get it ) but at the end of the
article they admit they use another service/plugin for it and that it's not
that great.

Careful, when you get to the scale that this stuff is not cheaper is also
about the point where you need to understand all the gory details of
distributed logging, or you could use splunk, but now you really aren't saving
money.

Seems like something like a periodic task that is not your main business (
read: needs to run 24/7 ) might be a better fit than cramming your entire app
into this architecture simply because your background workers are not busy
enough yet to justify being on 24/7.

Having said all that, the rest of the points touch on refactoring their app so
that much of it can run from an s3 bucket, and this in my opinion was best
part of the article as its good advice for anyone that wants to have things
fronted by a cdn.

At any rate, good luck with the entirely serverless architecture. Parts of it
are cool, parts of it are a recipe for save time and money now and pay for
those decisions later , and managing this is just another form of technical
debt, sometimes is worth it, but can be dangerous when seen as a silver
bullet.

