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Comment by notoverthere | Hacker News Reader

Serverless backends tend to work quite well when paired with a Single Page Application on the frontend – e.g. Vue.js or React. That way your frontend can be served from a static host – e.g. S3 or GitHub Pages – almost instantly. And so the perceived performance of your application isn't harmed (as much as you'd think) by the latency of your backend, since other aspects of the application's interface can load and continue to be responsive.

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To me, that does not seem to describe anything specific to "serverless"?

You've always been free to serve your static assets in any way you like, so I'm unclear as to how the way the backend is architected comes into play here.

Well, there's very little (if anything) that "serverless" can do that other techniques can't accomplish. It's about costs & benefits, not whether or not you can do something.

Though I tend to agree I'm yet to hear a really compelling description of why I should move very much into it. Some of this may be because I tend to write in a style that makes it fairly easy to mix & match bundles of application functionality anyhow, so to me adding some tiny function to a running app isn't that big a deal. (I don't use Erlang directly, but Erlang is where I learned this from.) If you're in an environment where deploying a single new REST handler or some recurring service is much harder, though, I could see where it comes in handy for certain things.

I think they're suggesting that bad latency from a serverless architecture is mitigated by a SPA, since the application can render and appear functional while it's fetching data.

Still, not sure how damage control for poor performance is a "pro" of serverless design.

I guess. I fail to see how this is better than sticking an API server onto Heroku or similar, especially given the engineering hours spent will easily dwarf any potential hosting cost differences.

Not sure if any of the serverless offerings are 100% there yet, but I have a hard time not seeing this as the future for most things.

I just want to quickly deploy code in a friction and maintenance free manner with zero compromises on scalability, latency, flexibility or reliability, what the problem is?

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