The Serverless Revolution Will Make Us All Developers
As a developer at a company that&#x27;s trying to shove Lambda down our throats for EVERYTHING...AWS needs to get better at a few key things before Lambda&#x2F;serverless become viable enough that I&#x27;ll actually consider integrating them into my services:<p>1. Permissions are a nightmare. You have to give both users trying to run lambdas and the lambdas&#x27; service accounts some crazy permissions sometimes in order to get anything to work. This is especially true with a lot of the &quot;make serverless easy!&quot; libraries out there, which seem to want an IAM user with all sorts of access that&#x27;s against our normal security policy.<p>2. Networking is equally nightmarish. We operate with lots of VPCs connected to on-premise hardware and network infrastructure via DirectConnects, and the only path out to the internet is through our corporate data center (again, security requirements). Most Lambda-centric tools seem not to like this arrangement, and often barf when there isn&#x27;t an internet gateway attached to the VPC. Moreover, especially in development environments we use relatively small subnets, which Lambda can consume nearly instantly if a large volume of requests come through. Finally, there&#x27;s some secret sauce to running Lambdas in VPCs that I still don&#x27;t quite have down-it seems to only work half the time.<p>3. If the future of compute is serverless, then Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and whatever half-baked monstrosity Azure has cooked up are going to have to get together and define a common runtime for these environments. I refuse to invest in serverless until I know that I can run the same code on minikube on my laptop as I can in &lt;insert cloud provider here&gt; because vendor lock in is real and will bite you in the ass one day.<p>&#x2F;rant<p>With reference to this article specifically, please, please chop off my hands and pull out my eyeballs if cloud computing becomes yet another workflow engine. I though we killed those off in the 90s.