Ask HN: Who Has Switched to Serverless?

• Hasura

  228 30,851 9.8 TypeScript

  Blazing fast, instant realtime GraphQL APIs on your DB with fine grained access control, also trigger webhooks on database events.

  

A lot of "serverless" is functions (i.e. backend or app server), but I would probably also say most apps would be fine on Hasura [0], a GraphQL-API-on-your-Postgres-as-a-service. I've built a couple apps this way and now I cringe at the prospect of building yet another CRUD backend.

Hasura + [some kind of FaaS] is great; definitely recommend considering this stack.

[0]: https://hasura.io

• neon

  124 12,327 9.9 Rust

  Neon: Serverless Postgres. We separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage.

  

I've been deploying to the serverless stack on Azure (Functions, Service Bus), and have been mostly happy.

Azure gets a lot of hate around here and it's hard to disagree with some of the lived experiences.

That said, mine have been mostly positive overall. Yeah, the support isn't exactly stellar, yeah, the deployments are not 100% reliable (but close), but which stack has zero issues?

For me, the benefits vastly outweigh the issues.

For Functions, Service Bus, App Insights, I don't really care about the infra I once set it up. Everything is automated, from deployments to scaling when traffic hits. The team I contract for has 0 dedicated (Dev)Ops. Compared to another project where we used k8s, that's a big win - there, we had 3-4 dedicated k8s experts on staff to keep the lights on.

Some services that we use on Azure are not really serverless, like the managed Postgres. That's sub-optimal as the database can very quickly become the bottleneck and can't keep up with the autoscaled function instances. I hope that what Neon[1] is trying to do - truly serverless Postgres - takes off and I wish Azure had that.

The tooling and integrations that Azure has is also a big win in my book. For instance, migrating a static website to Azure Static Web Apps (omg why didn't they just call it "Pages"?) is super easy. You get automatic deploys from main/master and automatic preview environments for pull requests. All it takes is a simple Github workflow. I don't think I would want to manage my own infra for that.

The downside of the serverless model is that once you hit a bug or a limitation of the platform, all you can do is open a ticket and hope for the best. Whereas if you own the server, well, you can dig in, obviously.

For me, once I understand the trade-offs and serverless comes out ahead, I go all in. YMMV.

[1] - https://neon.tech/

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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