Server or Serverless for the backend? What do you use?
Yesterday I've asked the IH community for front-end & back-end stuff we're using to build our projects and some answers are very interesting.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/b71b909fd0
There were some technologies I've never heard of.
Now there is another question I want to
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Sorry for any typos it's very late for me but it's the only time I can chat on this site.
For new applications I tend to choose a cloud native architecture instead of monolithic on a single server. The advantages are :
I have tried microservices solution with kubernetes and Service fabric. They are both great (SF is simpler IMO) but you pay the cluster even with 0 traffic, so not very good for projects just starting or MVP with a low budget. They are also complicated to manage, not ideal for small team or solo dev.
Serverless is a great option, you keep the advantages above, maybe lose some perf but zero traffic is almost zero cost.
I see more and more devs embracing the serverless model. I am doing the same and right in these days I am converting a simple application I had to serverless. I especially like the Azure offer in serverless with their durable functions. Now they also have in preview a programming model similar to actor model, where some type of functions (called entities) can handle a state attached with them. With this model you just have to focus on the code and almost forget the infrastructure , which for a solo dev is great.
Another thing I like about serverless is that if you pair it with static React pages calling serverless backend API you can build a dynamic web app costing pennies. Again this is great for us indie hackers. This is just a use case, the you have IoT, chatbots, and many others...
The irony is that a monolith written in Erlang or Elixir (my server stack of choice) gets you exactly these advantages, plus the ability to do upgrades without disrupting application state!
One thing that holds me back to use front-end JS frameworks for most of my apps is SEO. I need it. So the only way for me is to use something like NextJS or NuxtJS with server-side prerendering.
I highly recommend Nuxt.js with Adonis.js in the backend, then use microservices (I love Zeit Now) for helper functions and repeated tasks.
Have used NuxtJS and Zeit. Will take a look at AdonisJS, thank you.
Fast-forward a couple years and I’m doing exclusively serverless these days. The backends built-out with it are so low maintenance and reliable I haven’t touched them in years.
I would go with a server and a back-end MVC framework every time, for productivity reasons. Nothing matters more than getting to the market quickly and iterating quickly.
If and when I hit ridiculous scale or had extremely spiky usage patterns, I'd look at more FaaS-type offerings.
This is exactly what I do. Vue in the frontend. Laravel or NodeJs in the backend. Hosted on VPS.
Laravel + Vue + Digital Ocean is not only a great fit, but everyone from Jeffrey Way to Adam Nathan teaches it.
This is why TailwindCss came to my stuff ;)
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
I use a couple of VPSs hosted by digital Ocean that's served by their load balancer. Not had a single glitch or issue with then and nice simple interface and APIs.
I use the same approach just with BuyVM, Hetzner, and Ramnode. No issues so far.
I'm currently evaluting AWS appsync + DynamoDB for my side project. Would be complete serverless.
Never heard of AWS appsync before.
Serverless doesn't exist. There is always a datacenter somewhere full of harddrives and microchips. The real question is how much managed services are you using and what kind.
Yes, that's true. Don't know who is behind the word "Serverless" :)
It's "serverless" in the sense that, as a developer, you don't have to worry about the server. But yeah, a bit of a confusing name...
Kind of like "static" sites that have 1mb of scripts running on them and all kinds of interactivity!
Why not sit in the middle with shared serverless tech 🙂 https://hyper.host is a shared cloud environment that provides a fully load balanced auto scaling solution. When your site takes off and needs extra resource it has access to a private dedicated server during peak times, at no extra cost to you 🙌 - All for the price of shared hosting..
We now rent a relatively cheap VPS. Before that we have used AWS.
When already familiar with Linux, and interested in how this stuff works, you learn a lot and it really worked very fast. I had no experience in hosting and it was about a week to get everything together. We now have a Debian Server running Postgres and Nginx .
When we need to scale I would probably start using Docker or some CAI tool like Ansible or Terraform. I really like to learn this sort of stuff and I consider it worth to invest the extra time.
AWS is incredibly expensive for a backend which was the main point for moving away from it.
Same here. MySQL + Nginx on the Ubuntu 16.04 and cheap VPS.
We are using both serverless and dedicated instances. Any endpoints that take more hits are moved to lambda. Rest of the application code is server in a t2 medium Ec2 instance. Our DB is in MongoDB atlas.
Google Cloud Run. It's automatic, autoscaling, and amazing.
Trunk is a monolithic app spread across 7 instances on Google Cloud which I can scale up or down based on load. I don't use serverless for this since the nature of the app is very infrastructure and backend heavy.
I do have a few containers deployed on Google Cloud Run (serverless) for handling CI notifications to Slack, triggering CI runs from GitHub, as well as some other custom behavior.
I had a VPS for a long time, about 3 years ago I migrated to Azure. I really like the way the world is heading with all the tools available. In the past 10 years businesses have gotten a lot better at just purchasing tools vs. making devs constantly rewrite the wheel. I myself have bought into this philosophy, I'd much rather pay a few dollars a month to have the functionality written, and save myself hours of rehashing code.
This breaks into
Azure for my backend.
Auth0 for authentication.
Azure blobs for file storage.
Why did you decide to go with Azure instead of AWS?
I'm not sure if this is true anymore but at the time time it was cheaper. I have a SaaS that does video streaming. AWS was cheaper to host the videos, but Azure had much cheaper data-out pricing.
Also in my opinion Azure is a lot easier to use. It took me a long time to understand the AWS user interface.
Agree with you. AWS interface/UX is just a nightmare.
I use FaaS (I think it's a better name than Serverless) for my service: tayl.app. While it impacts developer experience negatively (deployments are slow, which impact dev cycle time), I prefer this over managing and provisioning servers.
But as always, it depends on the use-case.
Yes, agree with you when it comes to FaaS
For Spike.sh, I'm using both. I have an EC2 instance for dashboard and the main engine. However, I use https://zeit.co for receiving events from multiple integrations which is completely serverless.
DB is on MongoDB Atlas now.
This is really interesting combination. I've heard of MongoDB Atlas just yesterday.