Moving from Serverless to Functionless

"We've made fat piles of cash off of dysfunctional software for decades," said Micrsoft.

When it first came out the developer experience was awful but it’s come a long, long way. JSONata is definitely a big part of that, along with the workflow designer being available in VS Code and tolerant of placeholders (${Foo}).

The article’s callout of direct service integrations in API Gateway is also spot on. When they can be made to fit, they’re such a nice way to go.

What do you mean? You can already do loopless! Just send events recursively. AKA functional functionless architecture.

The article is basically making the point that deploying bits of runtime code, even something as simple as a single purpose cloud function, is unnecessary and makes work. The examples of using StepFunctions (declarative code) and “direct integrations” are given, the latter being the least effort to maintain, but in reality it also hides declarative code inside (e.g. VTL to change the shape of payloads).

The benefit is mainly removing the need to deal with runtimes.