To the future with Serverless Cloud
It has been a bit less than 4 years since I first heard the term serverless and only around 3 years since I got my hands dirty with it. As a beginner, I agreed that it’s less servers to manage, but anything else was more. It was more complex to build event-driven serverless applications, harder to secure as serverless shifts security responsibilities to developers, and harder to achieve observability as events go in and out between services simultaneously. Since then, many of those problems have been tackled with the innovation of great products. However, one thing remains constant: the learning curve is very steep, and serverless is far from easy.
Serverless as it’s meant to be
That’s what made me passionate about the Serverless Cloud when Jeremy first told me about it. We are calling our innovation “serverless as it’s meant to be” and it really is. It gives developers the ability to build Express.js-like APIs with a familiar syntax for accessing built-in data, secrets, and building scheduled tasks. All the infrastructure is automatically spun up and abstracted away. You need to focus on the code and only the code. Our own Doug Moscrop coined this as infrastructure-from-code and very recently, Shawn Wang envisioned a similar vision and called this self-provisioning-runtime. Last week, we went out of beta and made into the exclusive launch of the Serverless Cloud. The comments so far are so great that it puts pressure on us to keep the Serverless Cloud as lean and as efficient as possible.
Serverless Data
Serverless Cloud leads an opinionated paradigm not only for APIs but also for the databases of modern applications. After watching Rick Houlihan’s great talk and reading Alex DeBrie’s great book, I was sold on the single table design for many use cases. However, incorporating best practices into your data layer is easier said than done.The great news is that all of those best practices are already baked in Serverless Data thanks to Jeremy’s previous experience with his OSS work. You can manipulate Serverless Data simply by using get and set commands. You can define namespaces on the fly for your data and query with conditional operators. You can use labels to pivot and access your data for different views. In this way, you can add another dimension to your K/V storage and retrieve accordingly. See the docs for more information. I strongly recommend watching the chat between Rick Houlihan and Jeremy about the thought process behind the implementation of Serverless Data.
The Future of Serverless Cloud
A continuous flow of feedback from multiple sources is every product manager’s dream, and I’m currently living it. I’m really grateful for the buzz on social media about Serverless Cloud as it helped us look from different angles at our own product. Even before that, early beta users were helping tremendously to shape our features. We are not sticking to a long term roadmap, but there are several features that we’ll definitely add in the near future.
First of all, Serverless Cloud can’t be without events! We’ll be adding several event types to Serverless Cloud, like triggering functions on a record update and for inter- and intra-service communication. Second, we’ll give our users the ability to assign custom domains so you can share your Serverless Cloud applications with the world. Third, we’ll make the portability of existing Express apps easier so that you can migrate existing app into the Serverless Cloud with minimal effort.
Wrapping up
Software means something as long as it serves its business objectives. We want to let developers get rid of anything that distracts them from focusing on the business logic. We are still early, but we envision a world where all the infrastructure can be inferred from code. Serverless Cloud is ready for developers to build applications and deliver value to end users in the fastest way possible. We have granted access for a limited number of users in the scope of our exclusive launch and we’ll start to put newcomers on to the waitlist soon. If you want to be part of this journey, get your seat in our exclusive launch before it ends.
