Debunking Serverless Tropes 🔥

This is a brief attempt to obliterate 5 useless Serverless tropes. I used Yan Cui’s “Not so FaaS” as an outline but this is not directed at them personally. Enjoy the 🔥.

Trope #1 “FaaS is limited therefore Serverless is”

One could be forgiven for thinking Serverless is merely functions-as-a-service… 3 years ago. It’s time to stop equating the limitations of FaaS with the limitations of Serverless. Far too many sharp tweets and good articles exist on this subject for this kind of fake news to go unpunished. For the laggards, once again, here’s Ben Kehoe on the subject.

A dab of Simon Wardley for good measure.

Trope #2 “Serverless is not a silver bullet”

Why bloggers feel the need to concern-troll their readers with this crap is beyond me. Regale us with tales of how “Serverless does, in fact, use servers!” Water is wet. Name a technology that is a silver bullet. Then recognize your folly for even trying and kindly go read “No Silver Bullet” by Fred Brooks. Yes, that Fred Brooks.

Trope #3 “Serverless is for batch operations” or “Serverless is not for persistent connections”

Wrong a-gain bucko.

Trope #4 “Cold starts are bad m’kay”

News flash: container starts aren’t instantaneous. If you manage your resources as close to the bone as Lambda does your fancy Kubernetes architecture will experience cold starts too. In fact, if you aren’t experiencing cold starts as you scale, you are probably paying-for-idle.

I’m looking forward to all the “We Picked Kubernetes Cuz Cold Starts and Now We Regret It” posts on Medium in the years to come.

Trope #5 “Serverless isn’t for high throughput”

There’s this thing called Kinesis. There’s this language called Go.

Fin

Simon Wardley with the mic 🎤 drop.