Comment by crcastle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crcastle | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to explore the idea of a "server-less" app, so I built a tweet scheduler -- like what https://buffer.com started their business with -- except I wanted to do it without thinking about a server or managing any processes.

It uses Vue.js as the SPA plus AWS Lambda, AWS API Gateway, and AWS DynamoDB for the server-like stuff. It also uses vue-router and vue-loader, two official Vue.js libraries.

https://github.com/crcastle/serverless-buffer-app-gui

I plan to post it to the Vue.js forum http://forum.vuejs.org to ask for feedback on my use of Vue.js -- what I could have implemented more simply. Waiting until I finish the setup guide before posting it.

In general, I've been loving Vue.js. It's really simple and quick to get started, but as you get deeper you find that many subtle design decisions were well thought out.

EDIT: This is my first venture in SPA frameworks, having previously been overwhelmed by the learning curve of Angular, Ember, and React.

How is it server-less? Seems like the Amazon products you're using are, uh, running on servers? Not trying to be snide, just trying to understand what you mean by serverless.

I think he means having the servers abstracted away (i.e. not having to maintain them, not knowing how many of them should be running, etc...)

People need to stop calling that "server-less", that's stupid and the kind of buzzword that needs to die ASAP. There is a server, the fact that you don't have to manage it yourself doesn't change anything, you still need to upload your code to AWS lambda, how is it different from uploading a PHP script via FTP to a remote machine? it is not. PHP developers don't call their work "server-less". So people need to give up on using this expression now.

That's the most ridicule thing I have ever heard in my developer career. Who can anybody take a developer that says he is doing "server-less" web development seriously? frankly? What's next? the "database-less" movement?

If you consider a database something that is ACID-compliant, that move happened about a decade ago ;p

On the contrary, I think the term is succinct and meaningful despite not being technically true. Of course Lambdas run on servers, but there is a very meaningful distinction between Lambdas and traditional servers (whether virtual or dedicated).

I agree server-less is not technically accurate. That's why I put it in quotes. However, in the spectrum of

bare metal server <-> VM server <-> Heroku-like PaaS

I'd put this architecture to the right of Heroku. I have less to worry about from an Ops perspective than I do running the app on Heroku. On Heroku, I would need to think about and managing one or several processes. With AWS Lambda, there is no concept of a processes exposed to me like Procfiles expose on Heroku. That's nice in many ways but also limiting in many ways.

Also, note that I wasn't building this for rock hard and huge scalability production. I was building it to learn and hopefully help others learn about a fairly new way to build a web application.

Thanks. Wasn't trying to be argumentative, just wanted clarity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com