5 ms·

Show HN: A command-line utility for deploying serverless applications to AWS

68 points by jpartusch 6y ago

miguelmurca 6y ago
> Serverless UI deploys each function in your /functions directory as a Node.js lambda behind a CDN and API Gateway for an optimal blend of performance and scalability. Cool!
bezout 6y ago
How is this different than the Serverless framework?
- jpartusch 6y ago
  Good question! This is meant to be a "zero-config" utility rather than a generic framework. Under the hood, Serverless UI uses the AWS CDK to build a CloudFormation template with a few assumptions built-in (eg. deploying a static UI, anything in /functions becomes an endpoint, etc). As far as features go, it more closely aligns to Netlify, but with direct AWS integration.
  - abraxas 6y ago
    Yeah, this is an excellent idea. The trouble with Netlify is that the moment you outgrow their walled garden you're destined to complect your architecture with other cloud services anyway. Might as well start off with a rich ecosystem like AWS to avoid this issue.
kylegalbraith 6y ago
It looks like this is using the AWS CDK under the hood. So is this just a wrapper over the top of the CDK constructs for serverless?
- CharlesW 6y ago
  From the author in this thread: "Under the hood, Serverless UI uses the AWS CDK to build a CloudFormation template with a few assumptions built-in (eg. deploying a static UI, anything in /functions becomes an endpoint, etc)."
  - jpartusch 6y ago
    Yep! Diving deeper, the @serverlessui/construct package has a few custom constructs to facilitate the deployment. Additionally the @serverless/cli tool parses the project and configures a CDK App to synthesize and deploy. Overall, it saves the manual setup and pre-configures a CDK application without any config for the end-user!
cdubzzz 6y ago
Just an observation on the naming -- "Serverless UI" -- my first assumption from that was that this is some kind of _frontend_ to using Serverless. I was scanning for a demo in the repo when I realized it's actually a CLI utility.
suyash 6y ago
Would be better if it leveraged open source serverless project like Fn Project than proprietary cloud technology that locks one in https://fnproject.io https://fnproject.io
crescentfresh 6y ago
> and API Gateway for an optimal blend of performance and scalability Curious what HN's thoughts are on API Gateway. I've been very frustrated with it. I find a plain ALB simpler to work with and less weird. Sometimes to get API Gateway to pick up a change (via terraform) we have to log into the AWS Console to toggle a switch just to get our unrelated change to get picked up.
- Thev00d00 6y ago
  API GW is by far the flakiest AWS service I have used with Terraform. Even with all the badly documented depends_on that is required to make it mostly work it still was not great. It kind of makes me feel like using a reverse engineered driver, it works, but some kind of underlying assumption or knowledge is missing that makes it behave weirdly.
krat0sprakhar 6y ago
Do you plan to support firebase cloud functions or Google cloud functions?
ibrahimcesar 6y ago
What's is the difference than hosting option from Amplify?
- jpartusch 6y ago
  In my experience there has been a lot of code-generation and configuration involved with deploying an Amplify application. Additionally, it required a connection to a git provider (at least this used to be the case) My goal with Serverless UI was to make the experience as simple as possible to get started, while still allowing for integrating more advanced infrastructure as the application grows
shaggy8871 6y ago
This looks great. It's not specifically mentioned, but would this support NextJS if built statically?
- jpartusch 6y ago
  I haven't tested it specifically (I tried Gatsby), but it should work! I'm a Nextjs fan so I might try to tackle SSR in a future release

68 points by jpartusch 6y ago

> Serverless UI deploys each function in your /functions directory as a Node.js lambda behind a CDN and API Gateway for an optimal blend of performance and scalability. Cool!

bezout 6y ago

How is this different than the Serverless framework?

jpartusch 6y ago
Good question! This is meant to be a "zero-config" utility rather than a generic framework. Under the hood, Serverless UI uses the AWS CDK to build a CloudFormation template with a few assumptions built-in (eg. deploying a static UI, anything in /functions becomes an endpoint, etc). As far as features go, it more closely aligns to Netlify, but with direct AWS integration.
- abraxas 6y ago
  Yeah, this is an excellent idea. The trouble with Netlify is that the moment you outgrow their walled garden you're destined to complect your architecture with other cloud services anyway. Might as well start off with a rich ecosystem like AWS to avoid this issue.

kylegalbraith 6y ago

It looks like this is using the AWS CDK under the hood. So is this just a wrapper over the top of the CDK constructs for serverless?

CharlesW 6y ago
From the author in this thread: "Under the hood, Serverless UI uses the AWS CDK to build a CloudFormation template with a few assumptions built-in (eg. deploying a static UI, anything in /functions becomes an endpoint, etc)."
- jpartusch 6y ago
  Yep! Diving deeper, the @serverlessui/construct package has a few custom constructs to facilitate the deployment. Additionally the @serverless/cli tool parses the project and configures a CDK App to synthesize and deploy. Overall, it saves the manual setup and pre-configures a CDK application without any config for the end-user!

cdubzzz 6y ago

Just an observation on the naming -- "Serverless UI" -- my first assumption from that was that this is some kind of _frontend_ to using Serverless. I was scanning for a demo in the repo when I realized it's actually a CLI utility.

suyash 6y ago

Would be better if it leveraged open source serverless project like Fn Project than proprietary cloud technology that locks one in https://fnproject.io https://fnproject.io

crescentfresh 6y ago

> and API Gateway for an optimal blend of performance and scalability Curious what HN's thoughts are on API Gateway. I've been very frustrated with it. I find a plain ALB simpler to work with and less weird. Sometimes to get API Gateway to pick up a change (via terraform) we have to log into the AWS Console to toggle a switch just to get our unrelated change to get picked up.

Thev00d00 6y ago
API GW is by far the flakiest AWS service I have used with Terraform. Even with all the badly documented depends_on that is required to make it mostly work it still was not great. It kind of makes me feel like using a reverse engineered driver, it works, but some kind of underlying assumption or knowledge is missing that makes it behave weirdly.

krat0sprakhar 6y ago

Do you plan to support firebase cloud functions or Google cloud functions?

ibrahimcesar 6y ago

What's is the difference than hosting option from Amplify?

jpartusch 6y ago
In my experience there has been a lot of code-generation and configuration involved with deploying an Amplify application. Additionally, it required a connection to a git provider (at least this used to be the case) My goal with Serverless UI was to make the experience as simple as possible to get started, while still allowing for integrating more advanced infrastructure as the application grows

shaggy8871 6y ago

This looks great. It's not specifically mentioned, but would this support NextJS if built statically?

jpartusch 6y ago
I haven't tested it specifically (I tried Gatsby), but it should work! I'm a Nextjs fan so I might try to tackle SSR in a future release