> Serverless computing is in a much earlier stage of adoption, with nearly half of developers failing to clearly understand what it is.
I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue because 1) it clearly communicates what it is 2) there's not actually such thing as serverless since the functions are still running on servers. It's a made up term that isn't grounded in reality. It's not serverless any more than a Heroku Dyno is Serverless.
The first time I heard "serverless" I assumed it was a totally in-browser application.
I'd like to hear from the Erlang camp. It amuses me to think about what they must think of us darn kids taking their ideas and calling them something else.
What's really the difference between FaaS and Erlang style message passing?
> I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue
But "Functions as a Service" doesn't cover what it is, though.
The following AWS services are "serverless" but would not be "function as a service:"
* S3
* API Gateway
* SQS
* SNS
* Cognito
* DynamoDB
* CloudWatch (logs and metrics)
* Step Functions
In all cases, you are not provisioning or managing servers. Scaling is linear and costs are linear based on how much you use them, and typically based on what's actually being used (bytes stored, requests made, etc.) and not per-node. Because they're all hugely multi-tenant, they also cost almost nothing to use at low scale.
"Functions as a service" covers serverless compute, but it doesn't cover the huge architectural difference (from the developer's perspective) between the services above and rolling your own (for example) S3.
Like the Stack Overflow survey, this one does not distinguish server-side/client-side JavaScript, making it look far more popular than it actually is when considering the data in context of server-side technologies.
If 100% of the servers were running PHP, the results would likely be 50% PHP, 50% JavaScript.
These survey writers need to modify their question, or add another one specifically requesting server-side tech so JS can be accurately compared with server-side only languages.
Do you think a lot of people are running JS in a container for frontend? I wouldn't consider a webserver container a "JS container", even it were mostly serving a React/Vue/Angular app.
By the way it's worded, it sounds like the question is specifically talking about NodeJS.
Interesting to see the disconnect between hiring managers and what people say they care about most when considering a job offer (salary). Hiring managers claim there is a shortage of talent and that they do not care about offering a higher salary. Perhaps that talent shortage would mysteriously disappear if they increased their salary offers.
The number one thing on that list is "limited pool with relevant skills" and not an actual talent shortage.
IMO this is more from asking for specific combinations of skills used at a company than anything else. You need these two programming languages, this database, this frontend framework, these devops tools and these other skills would also be beneficial.
Generally, you're better off hiring as "if you are competent with one of these and willing to learn the others, you should apply". The broader the stack the more learning curve should be assumed with the hiring process.
But it's not in a lot of cases. This also goes hand in hand with the professional development opportunities cited at the beginning of for retention sake.
Computers are a tool of Automation. A seasoned engineer can build amazing things that does the work of many humans. Not only that 10X developers don’t work 10X hard, they are able to solve 10x problems with 1X effort because of their domain experience and approach to problem solving.
This kinds of people are hard to find. It’s a terrible business decision not to pay them well because their ROI is multiple times their salaries.
They are also very rarely on the market sending out resumes. Mostly because they get jobs mostly via friends of friends and referrals.
But I do agree a 100%, we should be getting paid more. If you’re not getting paid enough, look for other opportunities. There are plenty.
The tech industry has never been as profitable as it is now. We are in a huge tech boom right now. AppAmaGoogMsft are all poised to be the first trillion dollar corporations.
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.
While Kubernetes was most popular overall, the smallest companies (1-5 employees) use Docker Swarm more often (41 percent use Swarm vs. 31 percent that use Kubernetes).
Did not know Swarm was this popular. Even overall Swarm is 35% to K8s 42%
However, there is a huge proliferation of hosted K8s services - AWS, GCP, Azure, Digitalocean, tons of others.
Nobody seems to be making a hosted Docker Swarm solution though. I wonder why - is it because the market doesnt exist because of the simplicity of Swarm itself ? Would be interesting to find out.
I can't help but wonder if this is a reflection of Digital Ocean's target market, and its late adoption of block storage and other functionality. Kubernetes is a pretty "serious" tool, and you'd expect "serious" teams to have a preference for bigger, more-established players like AWS/GCE. Digital Ocean having been moving up the chain but at least in my mind they're still associated with the "hobby site" mindset. Certainly I run my hobby sites there!
I wonder if a similar survey from the bigger players would have different results.
Swarm is dead simple to get up and running; it's baked into Docker. Maybe k8s is easy too, but I've always run into issues and the value proposition for pushing past them was never clear to me. There's no doubt in my mind that there are very good reasons to use k8s, I just haven't found them (nor looked especially hard).
I find it interesting (and perhaps predictable) that while only 11% of people had a top consideration when taking a job of "Quality of manager or management", 47% of people cited "Leadership / management was bad" as a reason for leaving a job.
I find 11% a surprisingly high percentage, since I would think "Quality of manager or management" is something very hard to assess during a selection process.
"the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between bootcamp vs. college graduates"
While the bulk of work at a lot of enterprises (banks, telcos, etc) are CRUD apps with some BPM, I did not expect a (hiring) manager to be unable to make such a simple distinction.
Hopefully it could be the case that 'we don't discriminate based on that' is simply the polite/legal thing to say, especially considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...
> "the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between bootcamp vs. college graduates"
Since the industry norm is "You're all equally worthless until proven otherwise" I don't find it all that surprising. They'll take in your resume and toss you into the pipeline / grinder and if make it through the crucible unscathed, well, congrats you'll get a job offer!
Being neither a college nor a bootcamp graduate, I've found very few places give a damn what you've got framed on your wall at home. What matters is if you can hack it in the real world. The only time I've been turned away for lack of credential was Booz Allen Hamilton, and they exist to arbitrage you to the government which still seems to care about proper documents.
> considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...
Well, that would mean 52% surveyed have hired a bootcamp graduate which is pretty surprising to me, personally, since the camp(s) in my metro seem to produce about two good candidates per cycle.
>Ninety-four percent of our respondents self-identified as men, 5 percent as women, and 1 percent as non-binary/other.
Seems like this survey was highly self selective, so I'd take the entire thing with a grain of salt. There's no way the industry as a whole is anywhere near 96% male.
> There's no way the industry as a whole is anywhere near 96% male.
What do you think is the correct percentage? 96% seems reasonably close to the anecdotal gender ratio (~1/35 students being female) of undergrads from when I was in university a long time ago.
The pool of respondents are Digital Ocean customers? I'm assuming that would exclude employees of FAANG plus basically all really large "enterprise" businesses. Is that fair to assume?
If that is fair, I wonder how biased these results are. If we included FAANG and/or big corporations where tech is key but not a cultural staple (e.g. Walmart) I wonder what the results would look like.
It'd also exclude anyone who wanted to host their own site, anyone who stuck with traditional hosting companies/services, anyone who used a service like AWS or Azure to host their site/app, etc.
If so, that'd certainly influence the results a lot, and alongside your examples of FAANG employees and large enterprises, make the survey seem a bit too biased to be all that useful.
This is a nice breakdown but the most interesting thing I see is keeping the statistics to themselves by posting them to the site as svgs, not images and not text. You can't highlight them for copypasting even though a screenshot will work but you can't right click for saving to an image either. Thanks for the technique.
I'm not sure that was the intention. It's easier to cater to different screen resolutions with a vector format. You can always take a screenshot if you want or link to the article.
Has anyone chosen digital ocean over aws/gcp/aZure when building a scalable setup (for pricing reasons). Eg setting up your own load balancers/ private master slave dB machines / bunch of ansible to organize it all.
Fwiw, Digital Ocean keeps adding more and more options on the service front. Several storage options, load balancers w/ Let's Encrypt built in, etc.
Keeps growing. IMO the biggest gap for them is lack of a database service like RDS. There are providers of that service that can be deployed to DO...but the cost of those providers is high enough to disincentivize the price appeal of DO in the first place.
It would be really interesting to see them partner with a known player like Citus.
Interesting to compare the frequently used languages of those using containers to the Stackoverflow Dev survey.
- Javascript 57% use vs 71.5% I had always thought JS was high on the Stackoverflow survey because it included people using it on the frontend. Not necessarily the case.
So it's the result of a survey? That's a bit disappointing. Quarterly report makes me think it'll be extrapolated from DigitalOcean's usage metrics. Surely some of the things, such as containers could be inferred from real usage.
Also, unlike stackoverflow, if the respondents were DigitalOcean users I would imagine some things would be considerably skewed - for instance the popularity of "Serverless". I assume that since DigitalOcean doesn't offer serverless products people who use serverless aren't on DigitalOcean.
[+] [-] brightball|7 years ago|reply
I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue because 1) it clearly communicates what it is 2) there's not actually such thing as serverless since the functions are still running on servers. It's a made up term that isn't grounded in reality. It's not serverless any more than a Heroku Dyno is Serverless.
The first time I heard "serverless" I assumed it was a totally in-browser application.
[+] [-] styfle|7 years ago|reply
- Software as a Service (SaaS) - a product such as GitHub or Slack
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - VM or LB as you find in Azure or AWS or Digital Ocean
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - sometimes called Container as a Service as you find in Heroku or Zeit Now
- Function as as Service (FaaS) - a single function as you find in Lambda
[+] [-] frou_dh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choward|7 years ago|reply
So the term "serverless" made you think there was no server involved? What could have possibly made you think that?
"Serverless" is up there with "cloud" for the dumbest most overused words in technology right now.
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|7 years ago|reply
What's really the difference between FaaS and Erlang style message passing?
[+] [-] moduspwnens14|7 years ago|reply
But "Functions as a Service" doesn't cover what it is, though.
The following AWS services are "serverless" but would not be "function as a service:"
* S3
* API Gateway
* SQS
* SNS
* Cognito
* DynamoDB
* CloudWatch (logs and metrics)
* Step Functions
In all cases, you are not provisioning or managing servers. Scaling is linear and costs are linear based on how much you use them, and typically based on what's actually being used (bytes stored, requests made, etc.) and not per-node. Because they're all hugely multi-tenant, they also cost almost nothing to use at low scale.
"Functions as a service" covers serverless compute, but it doesn't cover the huge architectural difference (from the developer's perspective) between the services above and rolling your own (for example) S3.
[+] [-] mmilano|7 years ago|reply
If 100% of the servers were running PHP, the results would likely be 50% PHP, 50% JavaScript.
These survey writers need to modify their question, or add another one specifically requesting server-side tech so JS can be accurately compared with server-side only languages.
[+] [-] mawburn|7 years ago|reply
By the way it's worded, it sounds like the question is specifically talking about NodeJS.
[+] [-] whb07|7 years ago|reply
I get your point, but they probably asked “what language do you develop with”.
[+] [-] lightbyte|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brightball|7 years ago|reply
IMO this is more from asking for specific combinations of skills used at a company than anything else. You need these two programming languages, this database, this frontend framework, these devops tools and these other skills would also be beneficial.
Generally, you're better off hiring as "if you are competent with one of these and willing to learn the others, you should apply". The broader the stack the more learning curve should be assumed with the hiring process.
But it's not in a lot of cases. This also goes hand in hand with the professional development opportunities cited at the beginning of for retention sake.
[+] [-] nathanaldensr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nojvek|7 years ago|reply
This kinds of people are hard to find. It’s a terrible business decision not to pay them well because their ROI is multiple times their salaries.
They are also very rarely on the market sending out resumes. Mostly because they get jobs mostly via friends of friends and referrals.
But I do agree a 100%, we should be getting paid more. If you’re not getting paid enough, look for other opportunities. There are plenty.
The tech industry has never been as profitable as it is now. We are in a huge tech boom right now. AppAmaGoogMsft are all poised to be the first trillion dollar corporations.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Steltek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannyB2|7 years ago|reply
(until the bill comes)
[+] [-] sandGorgon|7 years ago|reply
While Kubernetes was most popular overall, the smallest companies (1-5 employees) use Docker Swarm more often (41 percent use Swarm vs. 31 percent that use Kubernetes).
Did not know Swarm was this popular. Even overall Swarm is 35% to K8s 42%
However, there is a huge proliferation of hosted K8s services - AWS, GCP, Azure, Digitalocean, tons of others. Nobody seems to be making a hosted Docker Swarm solution though. I wonder why - is it because the market doesnt exist because of the simplicity of Swarm itself ? Would be interesting to find out.
[+] [-] sho|7 years ago|reply
I wonder if a similar survey from the bigger players would have different results.
[+] [-] weberc2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mromanuk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingdave|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kurtz79|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fhood|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmngomes|7 years ago|reply
"the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between bootcamp vs. college graduates"
While the bulk of work at a lot of enterprises (banks, telcos, etc) are CRUD apps with some BPM, I did not expect a (hiring) manager to be unable to make such a simple distinction.
Hopefully it could be the case that 'we don't discriminate based on that' is simply the polite/legal thing to say, especially considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...
[+] [-] mieseratte|7 years ago|reply
Since the industry norm is "You're all equally worthless until proven otherwise" I don't find it all that surprising. They'll take in your resume and toss you into the pipeline / grinder and if make it through the crucible unscathed, well, congrats you'll get a job offer!
Being neither a college nor a bootcamp graduate, I've found very few places give a damn what you've got framed on your wall at home. What matters is if you can hack it in the real world. The only time I've been turned away for lack of credential was Booz Allen Hamilton, and they exist to arbitrage you to the government which still seems to care about proper documents.
> considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...
Well, that would mean 52% surveyed have hired a bootcamp graduate which is pretty surprising to me, personally, since the camp(s) in my metro seem to produce about two good candidates per cycle.
[+] [-] aphextron|7 years ago|reply
Seems like this survey was highly self selective, so I'd take the entire thing with a grain of salt. There's no way the industry as a whole is anywhere near 96% male.
[+] [-] jfim|7 years ago|reply
What do you think is the correct percentage? 96% seems reasonably close to the anecdotal gender ratio (~1/35 students being female) of undergrads from when I was in university a long time ago.
[+] [-] mtberatwork|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clarkmoody|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lakechfoma|7 years ago|reply
If that is fair, I wonder how biased these results are. If we included FAANG and/or big corporations where tech is key but not a cultural staple (e.g. Walmart) I wonder what the results would look like.
[+] [-] CM30|7 years ago|reply
If so, that'd certainly influence the results a lot, and alongside your examples of FAANG employees and large enterprises, make the survey seem a bit too biased to be all that useful.
[+] [-] drenvuk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrature|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abledon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brightball|7 years ago|reply
Keeps growing. IMO the biggest gap for them is lack of a database service like RDS. There are providers of that service that can be deployed to DO...but the cost of those providers is high enough to disincentivize the price appeal of DO in the first place.
It would be really interesting to see them partner with a known player like Citus.
[+] [-] yani|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golangnews|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
Wow. Can this really be true? Maybe strictly a web dev thing?
[+] [-] Blackstone4|7 years ago|reply
- Javascript 57% use vs 71.5% I had always thought JS was high on the Stackoverflow survey because it included people using it on the frontend. Not necessarily the case.
- PHP was third at 36%
- Golang was fourth above Java
[+] [-] geggam|7 years ago|reply
Also, if they are only polling developers are these actually production loads ?
Are the developers now doing operational tasks ?
[+] [-] Illniyar|7 years ago|reply
Also, unlike stackoverflow, if the respondents were DigitalOcean users I would imagine some things would be considerably skewed - for instance the popularity of "Serverless". I assume that since DigitalOcean doesn't offer serverless products people who use serverless aren't on DigitalOcean.
[+] [-] devmunchies|7 years ago|reply