Learn to build serverless apps by competing in cloud tank warfare

by adzicg • 10 years ago

2 3 10 years ago

red_blobs2• 10 years ago

'serverless' apps are not really 'serverless'. You are just allowing another company to run the actual server infrastructure.

While this might be good for large companies, it's dangerous for startups. Someone else has complete control over the infrastructure of your business and it not only makes it difficult for you to make simple changes that could save you money, but it's very expensive compared to traditional servers that you run yourself.

I run all of my own servers and it would cost me 10X to run it on AWS.

Too many startups outsource their infrastructure or create a business that relies completely on another business platform like Twitter/Facebook and then get squashed when things change or the platform doesn't want you to have too much power.

The book called 'Hatching Twitter' shows exactly this mindset: 3rd party API users were cut-off because the execs at Twitter realized that only a few of the 3rd party apps together had enough of a user base to compete with Twitter.

Which is why all of these services follow the same handbook: have generous access to the API, after this brings in and builds the user base, Cut-off access and severely limit the API (to prevent users from leaving).

One other step is charging so much money for the API access that it bankrupts most of these businesses and then launch a competing app.

adzicg• 10 years ago

I think you're missing a huge point there in terms of time to market and stuff an organisation wants to deal with. No matter how good I get at server ops, Amazon will always be way better than me. They probably have patents on how to cool data centres. A small company, like mine, has to choose its battles if it's to launch products quickly, and competing in server maintenance isn't what will make those products better.

And sure, I can self-host something and it's going to be cheaper if you just measure the cost of hardware. but count in the cost of humans maintaining that, patching the OS, dealing with security, working the network etc. You might be particularly good at that (and if you're running all your stuff you probably are), but I'm not. And I don't want to be. I want to focus on building stuff that I care about. So paying a bit more for server hosting works out a lot cheaper than managing all that myself, as I can focus on other things.

On the whole serverless thing - yes, it's a buzzword, but people tend to look at it from a technical perspective which is all wrong. the financial side is what matters. the tech isn't really that exciting there -- sure, there's a lot of new tech like containers, but the major change is that I'm only paying for stuff when it does something useful, instead of paying for servers to sit idle. But that's a topic for a completely different discussion. I published some of my thoughts on it here: https://gojko.net/2016/08/27/serverless.html

red_blobs2• 10 years ago

like I said, it's all about control. It gives a company like Amazon too much control over your business..especially when it comes to price.

Most hosting providers take care of any hardware issues and open source has come a long way. It's not that difficult to manage and scale a medium-traffic website.

In all likelihood, you will never need the level of scaling Amazon provides and are overpaying for the service.

I've been running web businesses for over a decade and have seen many companies fold because they give too much control to another business.

Learn to build serverless apps by competing in cloud tank warfare

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