storafrid
Joined 11 years ago
Joined 11 years ago
The serverless function has higher-order features included as part of the package: you get an automatic runtime (just as with PHP but in this case it can be golang or dotnet), the function gets a unique endpoint URL, it can be triggered by events in other cloud services, you get execution logging (and basic alerting), multiple functions can be chained together (either with events or as a state machine), the function's compute can be automatically scaled up depending on the traffic, etc.
Think of it as: What do I have to do, in order to scale up the conpute of this URL? For hardware it's a call to DELL to order parts, for VMs or containers it's a matter of scaling up that runtime, or adding more instances - neither of those processes are simple to automate. One key characteristic of the function is that it will scale horizontally basically however much you want (not fully true, aws has a limit of 1500 instances/second iirc, but that's pretty massive), and it will do it automatically and without the request sources ever noticing.
Functions are also dirt cheap for low/burst traffic, and deployment is almost as easy as in the PHP FTP example. Personally I also think they are easier to test than traditional apps, due to their stateless nature and limited logical size (one endpoint). The main downsides are cost for sustained load, and latency for cold starts.
With that said, they are not "endgame". Just a tool - a great one for the right job.
I just pointed out that personally I would not consider Lambda - which has been a stable and popular technology for 10 years - to be cutting-edge. It's not old but also not cutting-edge imo. I would reserve that term to newer technology. Apparently a controversial view on HN, which is interesting.
To respond to your question, I did work for a bank in 2017 with moving certain burst-type processing to a set of Lambdas.
Having a good amount of background processes running (terminal stuff, IDE, Slack, Google Drive, OneDrive, VPN etc. is probably hard to test without introducing more variance, but I can imagine they could play a part. Especially on an 8 GB unified memory MacBook.
> RTO for giants is a must because they die without the office.
Are you referring to tech giants here? That's what the thread was about I believe (interviewing for tech roles, at least). Just to make sure - you are not including Starbucks here.
> Offices are the last meaningful /.../ [stuff that I probably agree with] /.../
> Essentially if we WFH for all eligible jobs we re-create a SMEs economy killing the giants
This is what sounded like conspiracy to me. Would RTO due to "saving Starbucks" really be an argument line that Apple pursues?
For example, one hiring team maybe prioritized specific technical skills for a certain role, which affected your outcome in that particular process.