Why I'm excited about serverless as a frontend engineer
- Authors
- Name
- Tomasz Łakomy
- @tlakomy
Back to the basics
Basically every non-trivial web app (e.g. Uber for Bunnies) is composed out of three basic components, think of it as a recipe:
- Visuals (frontend) - a layer that users interact with, so your good ol' trio of HTML/CSS/JavaScript (with a dash of jQuery plugins, tracking scripts and whatnot. Sometimes even with some animations sprinkled here and there)
- Logic (backend) - the brainz of your app. This is where the vast majority of logic lives and here be dragons (and databases). Before the node.js days working with backend was more or less a completely separate skillset than writing frontend code (e.g. PHP backend and jQuery-driven frontend)
- Where-it-all-lives (infrastructure) - the website you're seeing right now is hosted somewhere. Code and logic doesn't exist in a vacuum - something has to run it. Therefore to handle production-grade load of your Uber for Bunnies website you need a server (or servers) (or an old PC in the corner of your room running your entire site, I don't judge).
All of this just to move those two c h u n k s from point A to point B
Problems
I've personally been focused strictly on frontend part of this trio for the last couple of years. From vanilla JS, through jQuery, Backbone, Angular, CoffeeScript (I don't want to talk about it), React, and React to React.
To be honest here for a second - I found the rest of that to be straight up daunting for the majority of my career.
Writing a node.js script to perform an action? Sure I can do that!
Configuring a MySQL DB from scratch, provisioning a server to run it and spending 4 days to be able to save a todo in a database? Please tell me we have an IE8 bug to fix, I don't want to do that
After a couple of years I'm fairly confident that given enough time and will power I'm able to figure out quite a lot of stuff on my own but here's the thing:
I don't want to do everything on my own
At this point I've lost track of how many times I've said "this shouldn't be this difficuly, it's 20XX! in my career.
As a developer I'm getting paid for building products, solving problems, causing bugs and fixing them. And I love that!
Building products that allow others to solve problems is my jam.
Setting up entire node.js sever to host a single index.js function that will get called a couple of times per day is not.
Focusing on what's important
The reason why I'm so excited about serverless from a frontend engineer perspective is that it allows me to delegate away my problems.
And it's not the first time I see a shift like this happen.
Q: Why did I move from Backbone to React?
A: Because React abstracted away a lot of problems I've personally had with building Backbone apps (e.g. performance issues and lack of reusable components)
Q: Why I'm excited about serverless?
A: Because serverless technologies abstract away the problems I don't want to deal with (setting up servers, scaling them, hosting my logic etc.) and allow me to just run my code whenever I need it to.
To make things simple - in this post when I mention serverless I'm referring to AWS Lambda (feel free to check out WTF is AWS Lambda).
Why do we refer to AWS Lambda as a serverless technology? Because yes, there are servers but you don't have to think about them.
The whole problem of managing, provisioning, scaling and whole lotta -ing is managed by somebody else. And the best part is that this 'somebody' is AWS - a company that has world class experts on the job, not to mention more servers that you could count in a month [citation needed].
Honestly, for me it's as if a whole new world of possibilities has opened 🎉
A Full Stack Serverless Developer might be the most desired engineering role in the next couple of years. For a very good reason - having someone on the team that knows how to best combine various serverless technologies to solve your problems (with greatly optimized costs!) is going to be incredibly valuable.
This slide from AWS Re:Invent 2017 is a glimpse in the future we're already seeing with the advance of serverless technologies:
You know, I'm just really happy to have more tools in my toolkit that I get to play with and use to build better features, products and solving problems faster (and cheaper!)
I'd like to learn more, how can I do that?
Check out those resources to learn more:
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