We've been building serverless application dev tools for ~4 years now. In the process, we've seen incredible efforts to emulate the cloud locally. The result is usually the same: it requires tons of effort, the work is often brittle, and it still is not identical to how your app will perform in the real cloud environment (e.g. you deploy and immediately run into an API limit error). Further, the reason developers mostly want local emulation is because deploying to the cloud is simpler too darn slow.

Given this experience, our hypothesis is if we can greatly increase the speed of deployment, developers will be less interested in local emulation.

With Serverless Components, we're now achieving incredible results. First deployment always takes a bit longer due to initial creation of resources, some of which are global (e.g. AWS IAM), but all Serverless Components are designed to deploy as fast as possible and we're aiming for ~5s max in deployment time as our key metric. We'll go into detail later about how we've been able to optimize this.