
Serverless Architectures - banderon
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html
======
gavinpc
Previous:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208)

And the day before that:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913463)

And the day before that:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11910246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11910246)

~~~
buckbova
FYI, article does get updated regularly.

But, last update:

04 August 2016: Added “Future” and “Conclusion”

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nzoschke
Fanstatic article, that gets the subtleties correct. This is my favorite part:

> If we see the gap of management and scaling between Serverless FaaS and
> hosted containers narrow the choice between them may just come down to
> style, and type of application. For example it may be that FaaS is seen as a
> better choice for event driven style with few event types per application
> component, and containers are seen as a better choice for synchronous-
> request driven components with many entry points. I expect in 5 years time
> that many applications and teams will use both architectural approaches, and
> it will be fascinating to see patterns of such use emerge.

We will see this gap narrow.

I'm running tons of ECS workloads and operating the servers takes no effort.
Amazon releases AMIs, CloudFormation automates AMI updates and scale, and ASGs
keep everything running.

It took effort to learn these techniques and build tools that use them, but
that's solved by open source software.

See Convox for an OSS project that sets it all up out of the box:
[https://github.com/convox/rack](https://github.com/convox/rack). Disclaimer:
I work on Convox full time.

> containers are seen as a better choice for synchronous-request driven
> components with many entry points

Is absolutely correct, and describes ~95% of real-world software. For
greenfield on AWS, I'd definitely see if Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB will
work. For all those "old" Java, Python, PHP and Postgres systems out there, we
have to run traditional containers, and load balancers and databases.

There's really no future where we are all "serverless". But there is a future
where the resource cost and operational burden of both Containers and
Functions is very very low.

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ryanburk
re: scale and on demand: "you only pay for the compute that you need, down to
a 100ms boundary in the case of AWS Lambda"

it will be interesting to see how small these boundaries can become before it
is too expensive to measure at the level of granularity sought. when you can
spin up a container, run job, and destroy faster than you can even log.

~~~
brianwawok
A Java app that uses 1 GB of ram still uses 1 GB of ram.

Either you pay to idle 1 GB of ram on some giant server somewhere, or you put
it on really fast SSD and pay the time to load it all into ram.

Now a little Python or C routine that uses 8 MB of ram... becomes a much
easier thing to do.

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aikah
Still can't stand that ridiculous buzzword. Fortunately with the moniker like
that no professional will take that trend seriously..

