Why We Love Serverless

by Alpine Codex

Published Thu Nov 02 2023

Introduction

Serverless technology has been gaining immense popularity in recent years, quite literally revolutionizing the way web applications are developed and deployed. As its name suggests, serverless technology allows us as developers to focus purely on coding application logic without worrying about managing servers and infrastructure. If you're anything like us and you dislike devops, serverless is the way to go. We can simply create web apps without the headache of managing overhead. Not to mention that when starting out, serverless can be extremely cost effective.

Benefits of Serverless Technology for Small Teams Like Ours

Cost-effectiveness and scalability

One of the major advantages of serverless technology for small web applications is its cost-effectiveness. Traditionally, hosting and scaling web applications required allocating resources based on expected traffic, often resulting in high infrastructure costs. Serverless technology, on the other hand, allows for automatic resource allocation. This means that you only pay for the actual usage. This pay-as-you-go model makes it exceptionally cost-effective, especially for small web applications with fluctuating traffic patterns. Plus, services like Vercel and Netlify have extremely generous free tiers that allows you to grow a web app to hundreds of users before incurring even a cent in costs. It's perfect for small teams or development agencies that want to ship code fast at a low cost.

Scalability is another area where serverless technology shines. With serverless architecture, applications can effortlessly handle sudden spikes in traffic without the need for manual scaling. The underlying infrastructure automatically provisions resources to match the demand, ensuring that your small web application remains highly available during peak periods. Basically, you can plug and chug and not worry about it crashing. This is why we love it.

Simplified architecture and maintenance

By adopting serverless technology, we as developers can say goodbye to the hassles of managing servers and infrastructure. With traditional deployments, developers need to ensure server availability, security, maintenance, and backups. This often creates additional overhead and complexity. It's honestly too much to handle if you're an indie developer or a small team trying to ship quality features quickly. We love how simple serverless is.

Faster development and time-to-market:

As everyone knows, speed is crucial in the world of software development. Serverless technology offers a significant advantage when it comes to faster development and shorter time-to-market. It allows teams to iterate rapidly, which means more code that gets out in front of potential customers! We pride ourselves on our ability to move and iterate fast. If it weren't for serverless, we wouldn't be able to do that.

Why we love serverless at Alpine Codex & 9d8

We don't know for sure if serverless technology is the future, but it sure is the present. We absolutely love serverless web technologies because they allow us to build and ship code quickly at a low cost. There is no better way to prototype an idea than by actually building a web application that can get actual users with absolutely no money coming out of our pockets. It's a zero-risk approach to building and launching web apps.

We're constantly using serverless technologies to build and prototype as fast as possible. Don't get us wrong, we often run into limitations of serverless that can be frustrating at times, but the benefits far outweigh the costs in our eyes. Plus, we feel that any constraints serverless tech introduces to us actually make us better developers in the end.

Wrapping up

It's cost effective, it's fun, it's fast. What's not to like? We love serverless. Do you?