I realized recently that Serverless is to developers as credit cards are to college students.
Remember when VMs came out, and people were like, great! Now I can constrain the resources of my OS! I can run 10 OSes on one machine! I'll save so much money !
Then we gave individual teams access to create as many VMs as they wanted, and suddenly all the hardware was used up.
Now do that, but in the cloud, with unlimited resources.
In my experience, those VMs were used briefly then left to rot. Consuming a large reserve of resources while doing nothing. Serverless should at least reduce the overhead of orphaned projects out there.
There's a secondary problem: when there are more resources, application development becomes less efficient over time. Even though there will be less infrequently used resources, the applications will use up resources more frequently in an inefficient way.
Example: I now need a minimum of 4GB RAM to browse the web, which is insane. 15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at approximately the same rate.
> 15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at approximately the same rate.
You probably weren't; perceptions of speed are often based on expectations set by experience, and your expectations were probably a lot lower then. If you actually could go back and browse the web of 15 years ago and the sites you could then, you would be disappointed, but the speed then was similar scaled to the expectations you had then as the speed now is scaled to your current t expectations. So your perception of the speed is similar.
I know I could have four browser windows open with 20 tabs each, to a random selection of web pages. If I try to do that today on a laptop with 2GB RAM on a moden browser, it dies from running out of memory. I tried using an older browser, but it won't render modern pages and uses legacy crypto. So I know for a fact that modern browsers simply can't work on older hardware, whereas the older browsers used to work, but are no longer compatible with modern websites.
Firefox didn't even have tabbed browsing in 2003 and everyone else was in the IE6 winter. FF was only 1 year old at this point. Were you using another browser?
Firefox didn't exist in 2003, it was released in November 2004. Before then, the name of the browser was Phoenix. It had tabs since version 0.1, released in September 2002. Later it was renamed Firebird and then Firefox.
Pre-tabs I probably had only 40 windows open at a time.
Yes, I definitely enabled all the beta/testing features. Tabs may have been limited "depending on screen resolution", but as a gamer I had probably one of the biggest screen resolutions you could run, with a CRT to match. I'm pretty sure I was using an AMD K6-2 500Mhz with between 128 and 256MB RAM. Sometime after 2002 I built an Athlon-based system with a gig of RAM, so I could be mis-remembering my computing platform when "peak browsing performance" happened, but I know that no browser has ever been as fast as Phoenix was.
More generally: when you detach the consequences from the causes, everybody misbehaves.
(This is, btw, one of the cornerstones of CI/CD. Show people the consequences immediately and their behavior will shift. I've seen this firsthand a number of times.)
Today it's possible to buy a laser-guided sleep-o-matic superbed that walks your dog and cures your back pain.
You can also buy a basic bed that's pretty nice and reasonably cheap.
15 years ago, you might have had a high-tech bed that didn't leave you sore in the morning.
1,500 years ago you had a bed of straw with fleas and bedbugs, but at least you had a place to sleep.
150,000 years you slept in furs on dirt by the fire, breathing smoke and aggravating your sciatica. Your bed was basically free, but since your livelihood depended on your full mobility, sleeping there was slowly killing you.
All these beds provided the feature of "sleep." So why would anybody need a sleep-o-matic, a bed worth more in 150,000 BC dollars than the yearly economic output of your continent? Why should we accept the massive waste of resources it represents?
Fifteen years ago, AJAX did not exist. Fifteen years before that our computers had VGA screens and megabytes of RAM. Yours is an oft-heard complaint in many quarters, but with respect, I have trouble taking it as indicative of anything other than the bitterness of age. Yes, the new technology is bloated and wasteful. As far as I am aware, this has been a fact of new technology for some time. Efficiency is one of the least important factors in software development.
Which is the problem. Everyone knows that I have resources, so everyone wants to use them by packing in every feature without any consideration for how much memory it uses. It's fine if I only wanted to run a browser or only wanted to run an IDE.
It's not that everyone should always strive to have the minimum footprint possible. It's that no one cares how big the maximum footprint can be.
Remember when VMs came out, and people were like, great! Now I can constrain the resources of my OS! I can run 10 OSes on one machine! I'll save so much money !
Then we gave individual teams access to create as many VMs as they wanted, and suddenly all the hardware was used up.
Now do that, but in the cloud, with unlimited resources.