
The Original Serverless Architecture Is Still Here - dangoor
http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/original-serverless.htm
======
Jyaif
I still remember the absolute shock GAE was to me.

Back in 2006, for a lot of people when you wanted to run a service, you
configured your own LAMP server. Once everything was running, you didn't touch
it and hoped there was not going to be a power failure.

Then GAE came and for the first time you got security updates, uptime, and
automatic scaling without having a dedicated sysadmin. Needless to say that
I've been a customer and advocate of this service from the beginning. My
oldest service is still running. I just had to update a .yaml file twice... in
a decade.

It's kind of sad the amount of people that are wasting their time
administrating their own servers when it could be done automatically. I
suspect the hype around k8s will waste millennia of man-power.

~~~
outworlder
> It's kind of sad the amount of people that are wasting their time
> administrating their own servers when it could be done automatically.

It is, provided your service fits GAE's limitations. If it does, great!
Otherwise, you are out of luck.

People are running a lot more workloads than LAMP servers.

~~~
jgeraert
I guess the same goes for Lambda.

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justicezyx
Title should be "GAE is an example of serverless developed in 2006" ( year
might be wrong)

Actually, as well known, nothing is new in computer science. Ubiquitous
computing grid computing and many other ideas I am not aware of, are all
rather similar to server less in the sense of granting application developer
the least friction of accessing computing resources.

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sytse
The trend is to have applications use less memory. On bare metal an
application used all memory, a virtual machine has the OS overhead per
application, on a container an application uses just one process, and with
serverless even the processes can be reused.

If I understand correctly AppEngin uses containers that do not re-use
processes, so not serverless according to the above classification.

I wonder why AppEngine didn't take off, the best answer I heard was that the
security sandbox was too small and people wanted more flexibility. What do
people think?

BTW As for Functions-as-a-service (FaaS) we're thinking about running the
Lambda code (which is open source) on Kubernetes [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab-ce/issues/43959#note_74...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/43959#note_74835448) how hard would that be?

~~~
watt
I tried to use GAE back in the day, and it suffered from cold-start issues.
Same story as if you tried to develop lambda-backed website with Java on AWS,
and your lambda may take 20 seconds to start from cold.

~~~
sytse
Interesting. Heroku had cold start issues when you were on the free tier and
didn't have any questions for a couple of minutes. Did GAE work the same?

~~~
watt
Yes, exactly. They would shut down your container (or whatever it was).

~~~
sytse
Makes sense. With Heroku I used to run a monitoring service that made a
request every minute to prevent this.

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peterkelly
Every time you use the term "serverless", a small, innocent puppy dies.

At least "the cloud" didn't mean anything. This is worse, because it's
misleading. There's a server involved and you know it. Anyone who hears it for
the first time initially thinks it means "oh, so there's no server involved,
it either runs on the user's local machine or uses a peer-to-peer
infrastructure".

Then you have to google around and find out that it actually refers to the
notion of having someone else maintain the server for you, just as was the
case for CGI scripts on shared web hosts people were writing 20 years ago.
Only once you realise this does it start to make sense.

~~~
nlawalker
It's like wireless.

There are most definitely wires, they're just not yours, and you don't have to
worry about them.

~~~
mmt
That's a weak analogy, since the vast majority of products that are called
"wireless" really are substituting, with radio (or optical), for products that
would otherwise use wires.

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jonny_eh
Isn't GAE PaaS? I thought serverless meant programs that served only
individual endpoints, like AWS Lambda.

~~~
KirinDave
You get a list of responses you need to handle. Nothing says your binary only
responds to one, or that there is a 1-1 correspondence.

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wwweston
This isn't an article on PHP served from shared/managed hosting, is it? ;)

~~~
jrs95
This actually is a good thing to point out IMO. This model did sort of
resemble a primitive version of serverless; that's why it was so popular. It
was quick, easy, and affordable despite it's many downsides.

~~~
wwweston
If the downvotes are any indication, apparently pointing this out is less
popular than the model itself.

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tzury

        - Serverless you say, hmmm, like pushing code, 
          and having *a server*, any server execute it. 
    
        - Yep.
    
        - We had it a decade ago, prior to the Cloud, 
          prior o the VPS, it was called CoLo. You were 
          pushing php code, and it worked on a server 
          we did not care about..

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jchrisa
Most of the cloud providers moved away from metered database pricing, and into
provisioned tiers. SimpleDB is an example of that early spirit. FaunaDB (my
employer) aims to fit serverless deployments like a glove. You can get started
here: [https://blog.fauna.com/serverless-cloud-
database](https://blog.fauna.com/serverless-cloud-database) or go deep here
[https://serverless.com/blog/faunadb-serverless-
authenticatio...](https://serverless.com/blog/faunadb-serverless-
authentication/)

~~~
Gys
I am very excited AWS Aurora will 'soon' be available as 'serverless': a full
sql database that comes up almost instantly
([https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/))

