Maybe I have been lucky, but I’ve never seen a company (including “cloud-native” ones) use serverless (code compute) like this. Lambdas only ever get used for tiny, atomic functions in my experience. Never heard of or seen someone try to do a 20-minute video conversion in lambda.
Any tool misused is a handicap, and I feel like the architecture presented here isn’t making it clear that serverless code compute was ever right for this task.
For instance, if video processing is being done on a constant or consistent, non-ad-hoc basis, why is serverless being used at all? Who made that decision? If it’s infrequent enough that it doesn’t make cost sense to run a whole dedicated instance, why not have a Fargate node (container) or something that encapsulates the “background worker” portion of the process? That would let you have an equivalent “simple” flow as in the original process diag, but without the limitations of doing everything in Lambda.
Lambda is great for things like building SOAR flows, e.g. disabling network access to a compromised instance, taking a snapshot, pulling logs, etc. Infrequent, able to combine cloud infra and host-internal actions, and fast. That’s a perfect use-case for Lambdas.
This reads as if someone doesn’t understand cloud compute, iac, and so on, and just got frustrated trying to learn and explore the paradigm.
That’s fine, but blaming “serverless” or aws lambda is like blaming a multicore cpu for having to learn threads and subprocceses.
Everytime I see serverless used - it’s always some illiterate frontender building next.js on lambdas. Always slow as molasses, always inflexible af.
It sounds like the problem you describe is not with the concept of using serverless/faas cloud compute and adjacent services, but with the design and implementation done by some engineers you work with. That may be due to time constraints, lack of familiarity, engineering skill, or some other reason.
I’ve seen terrible containers, terrible vms, terrible bare metal servers. I’ve written good and bad myself. And yes, I’ve seen (and done) great implementation of serverless. It’s all just tools to be used.
That’s a super interesting read, like, there have been a few services I used that were inexplicably awful in the exact ways described and I was bewildered by how bad it was.
