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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

I can’t talk much about serverless, I briefly tried some frameworks during the hype and I haven’t been convinced. It did sound more annoying and expensive than copying files using ftp to cgi-bin or mod_php managed servers like in the 90s and 2000s.

About software containers I think that the complexity is very very much worth it. Being able to ship software that run on my machine and will run about the same in production is so convenient. Running applications with conflicting dependencies is not a problem. Installing up to date or legacy software without breaking the operating system is also trivial.

Sure kubernetes is complex but it’s a bit more than running containers. A good start is using Docker or podman directly. You can see the value of kubernetes or nomad later.

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In my experience, you gain enough knowledge to set up a new container service in minutes fairly fast. I opt for containers because to me it's the perfect balance of ease of use, maintainability and performance. Managing container orchestration is completely optional too. All cloud platforms offer it as a service. With serverless I've had more trouble than benefits. It's not easier than containers to set up - often quite the opposite. When (not if) you encounter performance issues, they are either difficult to solve or simply impossible. I have never had this experience with containers.

The concept of “serverless” is just based around trying to recreate a cgi from a long-running process application. Like you pointed out, we have had this since mod_php.

Except we didn’t have spend a day to get the IAM permissions just right and embed some javascript into a huge blob of YAML. Simpler times.

Also, less secure times

Maybe in general, but that does not encompass every project or organization utilizing web technologies. There was technical know-how but often just a lack of willingness or understanding from higher up that prevented a security-focused approach to building applications.

Serverless is CGI for dynamically allocated server clusters managed by other people.

We didn't have that.

From the user’s point of view (someone developing an application), we did via shared hosting and cgi-style scripting. It doesn’t really matter what tech powered the infrastructure as long as it worked. Putting PHP scripts on in a folder to be called at will to perform specific actions was a pattern utilized to great effect with the additional benefit of not having to wait for the function to spin up.

Wasn’t the creation of mod_ the ability to keep the interpreter open?

Yes, before that, we had stateless scripting in web apps. Like serverless it was far easier to debug. Unlike serverless it was slow.

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