Comment by game_the0ry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by game_the0ry | Hacker News Reader

I am going to coin a new tech jargon buzz word: Micro Service as a Service (MSaaS). Copyright 2020.

I guess it was only a matter of time for the back end to be totally commoditized. As a UI dev, I find this pretty exciting that I have more options (serverless or building the server myself) and at what layer (IaaS, PaaS, FaaS, etc) from a variety of service providers (amazon, ms, google).

But if I was a back end dev, I would a little concerned about job security. It seems like that that career path is becoming more AWS/Azure/Google Cloud admin and less about needing to code business logic for the back end layer, especially as companies like Micro start becoming popular. From personal and professional experience, my servers tend to have little business logic and are usually a thin CRUD layer between the UI and DB layer (over-simplified, I know, but that is like 90% of the back end work I have done).

Then again, tech fads come and go and we need to adapt to the times.

In my humble experience as a full stack dev, backend jobs are going nowhere. Sure stuff like firebase and similar works for CRUD apps but as soon as you want to do more specific stuff they usually are worthless.

I have never used any of these backend as a service but I would assume you would struggle a lot with all kinds of data processing that needs to happen on the server side?

> In my humble experience as a full stack dev, backend jobs are going nowhere.

Agreed, mostly. What I am trying to say is there is a lot of change in the back end of the stack and it's in our best interest to adapt to that change.

But if you're not willing to change, your job security will become an issue.

> Sure stuff like firebase and similar works for CRUD apps but as soon as you want to do more specific stuff they usually are worthless.

Agreed again, but the fact that you have the option to use Firebase at your discretion is better than not having the option to use.

> I have never used any of these backend as a service but I would assume you would struggle a lot with all kinds of data processing that needs to happen on the server side?

It depends on the use case, and that is key. Too many engineers spend too much time arguing on a hacker news that their way is the One True Way (Trademark) - that is not always the case. Your business needs should drive your tech stack choice, and no one tool is perfect.

So if, like in your example, your use case involves a lot of data processing in the back end, then the choice is easy: favor building the custom server and associated data processing yourself, over using a BaaS or FaaS. However, if you are building a CRUD app where you have like less than 1,000 people using your app, you're time constrained, you don't have enough devs, then Baas/FaaS starts to become a more viable option.

(Language is funny in its subtleties. I read “backend jobs are going nowhere” as “backend jobs are a dead end where nothing interesting is happening, and they’ll dwindle away”. But the sense you intended was “backend jobs are not going to disappear”, which I would have worded “backend jobs aren’t going anywhere”, which should seem to mean the same thing!)

IMHO (this is for web / mobile apps) -

As computers become more powerful, a lot of the functionality which is reserved for the server side gets pushed to the client. The client ends up with more business functionality which helps in faster rendering, faster response. The application server's primary responsibility gets relegated to access control.

The other aspect of technology that's gradually coming to the fore is real-time communication. This enables even more business logic (in terms of access control) to be pushed to the client. Essentially, as game_the0ry mentioned, the server application gets relegated to a thin CRUD layer. And soon, maybe that CRUD layer will also go away, because the client knows excactly what is allowed and what isnt't.

As the world gets more bandwidth, more connectivity, clients become more stateful.

Conversly, this also proves that business rules are really are not that critical for businesses to function, rather it's the data behind them.

Why does a piece of software exist if it's not to implement business logic?

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