It's nice to hear critical perspectives, but I can't agree with most of these points. Serverless is "cult-like" because.... it doesn't support KISS and DRY "without help from frameworks?" This sounds more like a local problem than a fundamental critique of serverless architectures. You seem to acknowledge that good frameworks are the answer here, so what's wrong with CDK, serverless.com, etc.?
In addition, it seems like many of the listed problems boil down to "junior devs with weak support and practices ran into these issues." But have junior members on standalone DevOps/Ops teams never created an overly permissive IAM policy? Never copy/pasted YAML? Have devs never cut corners on local testing prior to serverless?
I think it's important to differentiate problems that are endemic to serverless/cloud native architectures from generic challenges that apply to all organizations adapting to new technologies and software principles. In my experience, the real cult-like mentality in software development is the pernicious belief that the benefits of innovation can be bought cheaply:
-- "We can just lift & shift our data center into the cloud, and reap massive benefits overnight!"
-- QA automation totally replaces our need for dedicated QA!"
-- "Software devs will handle cloud infrastructure, plus all their traditional responsibilities, with minimal support! And output will be higher than ever before!"
In many such cases, after the hype wave crashes, the most successful software businesses are the ones who followed through on innovative practices, but also paid their entry fee and have an impressive list of "Challenges we solved..." by the end of their journey. If your organization's leadership isn't prepared to support a serverless transformation, I would certainly stick to more traditional and practiced approaches, but I struggle to imagine many of these problems you listed going away with a simple tech stack change.
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It's nice to hear critical perspectives, but I can't agree with most of these points. Serverless is "cult-like" because.... it doesn't support KISS and DRY "without help from frameworks?" This sounds more like a local problem than a fundamental critique of serverless architectures. You seem to acknowledge that good frameworks are the answer here, so what's wrong with CDK, serverless.com, etc.?
In addition, it seems like many of the listed problems boil down to "junior devs with weak support and practices ran into these issues." But have junior members on standalone DevOps/Ops teams never created an overly permissive IAM policy? Never copy/pasted YAML? Have devs never cut corners on local testing prior to serverless?
I think it's important to differentiate problems that are endemic to serverless/cloud native architectures from generic challenges that apply to all organizations adapting to new technologies and software principles. In my experience, the real cult-like mentality in software development is the pernicious belief that the benefits of innovation can be bought cheaply:
-- "We can just lift & shift our data center into the cloud, and reap massive benefits overnight!"
-- QA automation totally replaces our need for dedicated QA!"
-- "Software devs will handle cloud infrastructure, plus all their traditional responsibilities, with minimal support! And output will be higher than ever before!"
In many such cases, after the hype wave crashes, the most successful software businesses are the ones who followed through on innovative practices, but also paid their entry fee and have an impressive list of "Challenges we solved..." by the end of their journey. If your organization's leadership isn't prepared to support a serverless transformation, I would certainly stick to more traditional and practiced approaches, but I struggle to imagine many of these problems you listed going away with a simple tech stack change.