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Why isn't Elixir dominating serverless architecture?
Background
A few days ago I was listening to The future of Elixir from Elixir Talks, with Dave Thomas (@pragdave ) and Brian Mitchell.
In this talk, Dave made the following question (paraphrased by me):
Why aren’t we dominating the serverless space? Elixir is functional, it has multiple processes and is parallel. It has everything serverless needs and wants, and yet Elixir has not risen to be the dominant technology in the area.
I think this is a pertinent question.
Questions
- In your opinion why do you think Elixir is not dominating serverless architectures?
- What main issues do you think Elixir has when trying to go serverless?
- Do you believe there is a competing technology easier/more fitting to go serverless than Elixir?
Let me know, I would love to know what everyone thinks !
First Post!
hauleth
Because “serverless” is a temporary fad on resurrecting CGI.
“Serverless” scripts should be able to start and stop quickly, as these are “run once” scripts. Elixir is very bad at such approach, it is better to have long-standing VM that accepts connections.
On the other hand within BEAM machine it is “serverless” as each incoming connection (at least in most of the HTTP servers out there) is new process, just like in serverless.
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hubertlepicki
Maybe because Elixir doesn’t shine as bright when you take away the OTP, the clustering and long-running processes that pass messages between each other thanks to the BEAM VM? 
Surely, it’s a nice enough language to be used to write functions with, and in fact very nice with the pattern matching and language constructs it has, also macros. But that maybe has not enough weight to take away the huge popularity of JavaScript and Python has and user base, while the end result is going to be pretty much the same.
Elixir & Erlang make sense when you are building distributed, long-running, message-passing system, which is the counter-definition of “serverless” architecture.
hubertlepicki
I don’t believe BEAM is built with a level of sandboxing required to run untrusted code in mind. Whenever you have a “serverless” architecture, you are allowing programmers to send functions and execute them on a virtual machine somewhere in the cloud, along with other programmers doing the same. I don’t know how technically this is done, but I suspect a strong reliance of OS-level sandboxing and one-off virtual machines, possibly keeping a pool of them already started and allowing instant execution, and then discarding them after the execution. It’s an educated guess but you can probably get to the details here: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Overview-AWS-Lambda-Security.pdf
Now, you could replace all that with BEAM if beam was built to do so. But it’s not. There is a lot of ways to start processes, call functions on current or remote nodes, execute code dynamically. It’s just going to be a nightmare trying to secure that environment and allow execution of untrusted code that needs to be sandboxed. A nightmare to the point of “it ain’t going to happen”, I think.
Similar thread: How to create a sandbox to run untrusted code/modules? - #25 by OvermindDL1
webdeb
It’s surprisingly, that nobody mentioned the real benefit of serverless here. IMHO its deployment. you just deploy a function and it maps to an endpoint. Therefore the BEAM could actually dominate, by starting process with a bit of business logic in it, hold state, emit events, and stop again. So I think it could grow into somekind of Platform for Modular Applications. Just provide a simple declarative way to deploy Modules into a running BEAM cluster, and its even better then what we know as Serverless today.
This is what I think would make sense
Last Post!
webdeb
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