Maybe I have been lucky, but I’ve never seen a company (including “cloud-native” ones) use serverless (code compute) like this. Lambdas only ever get used for tiny, atomic functions in my experience. Never heard of or seen someone try to do a 20-minute video conversion in lambda.

Any tool misused is a handicap, and I feel like the architecture presented here isn’t making it clear that serverless code compute was ever right for this task.

For instance, if video processing is being done on a constant or consistent, non-ad-hoc basis, why is serverless being used at all? Who made that decision? If it’s infrequent enough that it doesn’t make cost sense to run a whole dedicated instance, why not have a Fargate node (container) or something that encapsulates the “background worker” portion of the process? That would let you have an equivalent “simple” flow as in the original process diag, but without the limitations of doing everything in Lambda.

Lambda is great for things like building SOAR flows, e.g. disabling network access to a compromised instance, taking a snapshot, pulling logs, etc. Infrequent, able to combine cloud infra and host-internal actions, and fast. That’s a perfect use-case for Lambdas.

Modern software is built on towers of abstractions, each one making development “easier” while adding overhead:

Today’s real chain: React → Electron → Chromium → Docker → Kubernetes → VM → managed DB → API gateways. Each layer adds “only 20–30%.” Compound a handful and you’re at 2–6× overhead for the same behavior.

That’s how a Calculator ends up leaking 32GB. Not because someone wanted it to—but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users started complaining.

Man, this is so true. What sucks even more is that so many devs now don’t know how to build anything BUT this stack.

My current team has had a great solution to this, which is to re-build in parallel. Build the new system alongside the old one, including the reporting and integrations. You’ll find the edge cases pretty quickly.

For a minute I thought QuickTime was back…

I actually use Vim to write all my code, but without IDE-ifying it, just syntax highlighting and some navigation tweaks (with Sublime3 for help with bulk edits). For most of my stuff an IDE is overkill.

I was just being facetious by suggesting another commandline editor. ;P

Yeah, like Vim. Who uses nano to code?

This is just an extension of the larger issue of people not understanding how AI works, and trusting it too much.

AI is and has always been about exchanging accuracy for speed. It excels in cases where slow, methodical work is not given sufficient time already, because the accuracy is already low(er) as a result (e.g. overworked doctors examining CT scans).

But it should never be treated as the final word on something; it’s the first ~70%.

My tip, “developer empowered” means that the buck stops with Engineering leadership when it comes to dev work. They have to be able to greenlight work, and also red-light it.

That gives engineers the flexibility to build what they see is missing, while still having executive leadership (e.g. “Director of Engineering” etc) in the loop who can rein in rabbithole-development projects.

But the second you allow “Product” teams to dictate dev work, you will lose that developer empowerment, and they will always just be “the ones who build what Product tells them to”.

Never used it for a website or web app, but I’ve used it for getting scripts for managing my servers started. It always requires a lot of refactoring to make it actually usable. Since I know when the code is wrong, I can coax it through fixing the code itself, but it’s faster to just change it myself. I don’t think a non-coder would get a whole lot of useful code out of it.