3 ms·

I remember vividly my intro to "serverless". I had been (ab)using Javascript and Node.js for a while, breaking the internals of Express.js and messing around wi

I remember vividly my intro to "serverless". I had been (ab)using Javascript and Node.js for a while, breaking the internals of Express.js and messing around with many things. Someone told me that serverless was "like Node.js but without server, you just write code for an endpoint" and it sounded cool. Just I didn't need it at the moment since I was happy with my servers (I'm the creator of npm's `server`). I kept hearing about it in multiple places, and after many months/years I decided to dig deeper. I found out that "serverless" was just an instance of Express all along! My disappointment was immeasurable, I thought that you really wrote a JS function, executed by "3rd party servers" (ofc there's a server _somewhere_), or in worst case you just wrote a function with the signature of Express' middleware and export it, then to be run by their instance. But no, you actually had to set up the whole server and listen to a port and all, it was just more ephemeral than Heroku's already ephemeral servers. It wasn't until next generation that "true serverless" came, with Cloudflare Workers and the such, where you truly write a plain JS function that takes a Request and returns a Response as I expected almost a decade earlier.

jeffparsons 3y ago
I could almost imagine WASI being born of the disappointment people felt when adopting the first generation of things branded "serverless". "What if this stuff was actually as good as it first sounded? Want to make it?"
joshstrange 3y ago
And we are still waiting on decent frameworks for this method of writing serverless services. I have 2 projects running like this with a cobbled together group of utils/helpers to make life easier. No routing layer or anything, that’s the job of SST/CDK/SF/etc, but things like a handler wrapper to handle errors uniformly, and other tools I regularly need (permissions checking, payload validation, etc). I know some of that work can be done at the API Gateway/Lambda layer before it hits my function but I’ve yet to go down that rabbit hole, it always felt too limiting/rigid, I could and do move way faster in JS (TS). I feel like we are on the cusp of it getting so much nicer and I have a blast working in this space. I absolutely love knowing my backend will “auto-scale” to whatever I need all the way down to $0 and even on the high end (at my scale) well under $10. My projects are for events (think festivals or “food week”) and so they are extremely bursty. They go months at a time with little to no traffic so “Serverless” and managed services that scale to $0 or near $0 are awesome for my needs.

jeffparsons 3y ago

I could almost imagine WASI being born of the disappointment people felt when adopting the first generation of things branded "serverless". "What if this stuff was actually as good as it first sounded? Want to make it?"

joshstrange 3y ago

And we are still waiting on decent frameworks for this method of writing serverless services. I have 2 projects running like this with a cobbled together group of utils/helpers to make life easier. No routing layer or anything, that’s the job of SST/CDK/SF/etc, but things like a handler wrapper to handle errors uniformly, and other tools I regularly need (permissions checking, payload validation, etc). I know some of that work can be done at the API Gateway/Lambda layer before it hits my function but I’ve yet to go down that rabbit hole, it always felt too limiting/rigid, I could and do move way faster in JS (TS). I feel like we are on the cusp of it getting so much nicer and I have a blast working in this space. I absolutely love knowing my backend will “auto-scale” to whatever I need all the way down to $0 and even on the high end (at my scale) well under $10. My projects are for events (think festivals or “food week”) and so they are extremely bursty. They go months at a time with little to no traffic so “Serverless” and managed services that scale to $0 or near $0 are awesome for my needs.