Serverless Fullstack Application Template | Hacker News Reader

Serverless Fullstack Application Template

github.com

10 pointsac3606 comments

> Ready-to-use, serverless, full-stack application built with AWS Lambda, Express.js, React, AWS DynamoDB and AWS HTTP API.

I was curious whether it supported anything other than AWS, on self-hosted "serverless" setups. The components (Lambda, DynamoDB, HTTP API) seem like there would be compatible open-source implementations.

As a complete novice to the "serverless" concept, I found this:

https://www.serverless.com/framework/docs/providers/

> Serverless Framework is deploying your code to a cloud provider like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Apache OpenWhisk, Cloudflare Workers, or a Kubernetes-based solution like Kubeless.

Filtering for self-hosted, looks like these are what I should start studying:

Kubeless - https://kubeless.io/

Fn - https://fnproject.io/

OpenFaaS - https://www.openfaas.com/

This last one is very interesting for me, but apparently not yet supported by the Serverless Framework. https://forum.serverless.com/t/support-for-openfaas/3023

The biggest advantage of serverless development is that you don't need to concern yourself with the undifferentiated heavy lifting of self hosting and managing hardware, VM's, application updates, OS updates , networking, load balancing, etc and all the work that comes from that and focus on solving business problems immediately. Running it yourself will not necessarily add any additional benefit and you will will have wasted time and effort getting this entire set of complex infrastructure setup before you have developed any application code to actually solve business problems. Serverless is more than just Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB. There are all the other services you would need to spin up replacements for and manage over time; SQS, SNS, Kinesis, S3, etc including the inevitable delays yet again to get them setup for use by developers that just want to solve the business problem at hand.

Ha! The new infrastructure of cloud services was supposed to be easier. But it too has gotten complex, with managing VMs, app updates, OS updates, networking issues, load balancing etc.

All to get the often-vapor feature of 'scalability'. And it seems believable because these frameworks are so heavy, they run like slugs and need to scale almost immediately.

{old guy rant} In the old days, we got 1200 queries per second from our stock quote server, on a pathetic single-processor server with 12MB RAM. Didn't need to scale, not for 5 years.

The Serverless Framework doesn't add any load onto your application. It is essentially an Infrastructure as Code tool to help you compose an application out of a collection of managed services that are all pay per use and do not bill by the hour with no managing VMs, app updates, OS updates, networking issues, load balancing etc.

I'm sure! It sounds like a good service, since app folks are boxed in by the current paradigm.

Thank you for helping me understand what serverless means in practice.

After I posted my comment, I was thinking that perhaps the main advantage of serverless is that it's not self-hosted. That's the "-less" part, I guess.

> Running it yourself will not necessarily add any additional benefit and you will will have wasted time and effort getting this entire set of complex infrastructure setup before you have developed any application code to actually solve business problems.

I see.. The use cases I'm thinking of are small to midsize companies, as well as tiny startups, so their needs are not that complex. I'm also interested in local development environment for serverless, so that's why I was curious about open-source, self-hosted services that are compatible or feature-similar to a limited subset of AWS.

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