
Ask HN: What Are Your Experiences with the serverless paradigm and FaaS? - Satam
What are your experiences with services such as AWS lambda? What, if anything, were they lacking? What did they do right?<p>Additionally, could you elaborate on the specifics of situation where you used, or were exploring the possibility of using, these technologies?
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Satam
I'll kick things off.

I was first exposed to AWS Lambda when working on a scraper that needed to
operate in a few different regions. Its scale was relatively small and it
would only need to do its thing when a scraping job was manually submitted by
one of the users.

Initially, the Lambdas only interested me because they could easily provide my
"scrapers" with a nice and reliable way to access rotating IPs in the several
regions I need my script to work in. Shortly, I realized that it could offer
me quite a bit more than that: it could abstract away the troubles of creating
the architecture needed for running distributed tasks in the background.

Scalability was basically not a concern at all in my case, so Lambdas weren't
really adding much value in that regard. However, with the isolation of
functions into independent units that could asynchronously be invoked from my
code abstracted a lot of infrastructure work. I no longer needed to code a
background worker, I didn't need to care about queueing up jobs, and if I ever
needed to scale larger - I was already there.

Hooooowever, that's not a complete picture. Yeah, I was kind of able to set up
everything in a way that would do all the things I mentioned but it was only
after a bunch of cursing and frustration.

The documentation sucked. Packaging dependencies for deployment sucked. The
deployment itself sucked. Figuring out how to invoke it in a way that I wanted
sucked. In the end, although the service was one of a kind, the unintuitive
experience of working with it left me wanting for an alternative that does the
same thing... but well.

My experience is definitely biased, I was not looking for something that would
solve my scalability issues, I was looking for a solution that could abstract
the architectural headaches. In that regard, it failed me.

