I’ve spent a lot of time with the development community over the years but every time I get to talk to people in the serverless community I’m constantly surprised by the passion and the general excitement over this technology. Below is one of the latest of said topics and I wanted to share it with you.

For years we’ve been building apps the same way. We put together the infrastructure based on what we perceived as a requirement for that type of service and then we start building it using whatever framework we chose. Every couple of days we go back to change or tweak the server, make sure it scales, execute our logic faster, hardware upgrades and update the OS and apply security patches.

That’s how it used to be.

To put it simply, serverless architecture is an outsourcing solution allowing you to pay someone else to manage your servers, databases, and even application logic that you might manage yourself otherwise.

With serverless, we don’t have to meddle with all the hardware, software updates. We chose the framework from a list of predefined options by the service provider and we start uploading our code.

There’s no messing with the server in any way shape or form.

This provides an unprecedented advantage for developers since they can now focus on the business model and the quality of the app. On average they save about a day a week which is a game-changer.

Not focusing on infrastructure is a big paradigm shift!

But there’s more. Since you don’t have too/can’t mess with the server may cause a little bit of getting used to, especially when debugging things. Serverless has a lot of new features and quirks and one of those is the lack of observability that comes with the territory.

There’s no error log, there’s no cPanel nor there is an EC2 console that monitors the hardware and resources consumption.

Every service provider has something to aid in this regard, AWS, for example, has Cloudwatch. A solid service but far from perfect. It’s fine to debug small applications or a microservice, but keeping an eye on an entire application can be difficult since all the information is propagated into one single location.

#serverless #paradigm