What's your perspective on and experience with serverless backends?

[dimitarvp]

@wolf4earth

You might for example be surprised to hear, that NodeJS seems to have better cold start characteristics than go

Not very surprising having in mind this part of the article:

After that request is processed, the instance stays alive to be reused for subsequent requests.

With that, every language and runtime can be quite fast with a warm instance.

But the trouble is, every hosting provider’s goal is to reuse machines as much as possible and to charge as much as possible for the least amount of server power possible. And the cloud providers periodically stop the warmed-up instance. And if you have JS or even Elixir, the start up times are still pretty bad.

So having that in mind, I still think the languages compiling to a native binary have a big advantage.

@wolf4earth

In general the cold start characteristics of NodeJS rank among the fastest in languages commonly used in cloud functions.

I admit I am skeptical. The problem might be contained in this description: “among the commonly used”. It’s a fledgling area and I am not sure how much people tried how many languages and runtimes. JS’ V8 runtime engine is quite good, I know, but it’s hard to beat something like Go or Rust. So we might have a selection bias here?

@wolf4earth

TL;DR or in a nutshell I think that cloud functions, and by extension serverless, can allow us to build applications, or parts of a larger application, with characteristics usually reserved to much more complex deployments.

Absolutely agreed. Breaking programs into smaller, more specialized parts, has always been something that improves maintainability – long before the “cloud” has even been a thing. So I am fully for it! I am just kind of wary of the big providers; they don’t have our best interests in mind.

I’d likely be very happy to have something coded by the OSS community which can be transposed onto AWS / GCP / any-VPS-provider but not sure how viable that is.