Serverless and startups, the beginning of a beautiful friendship
I wrote an article for AWS blog about the way we use serverless for Vacation Tracker product, and why I think serverless is a good fit for startups.
I know that some of the people from this community are not big fans of serverless, but that's ok, I am always open to discussion :)
"Serverless seems to be perfect for startups. The pay-per-use pricing model and infrastructure that costs you nothing if no one is using your app makes it cheap for early-stage startups.
On the other side, it’s fully managed and scales automatically, so you don’t have to be afraid of large marketing campaigns or unexpected traffic. That’s why we decided to use serverless when we started working on our first product: Vacation Tracker.
Vacation Tracker is a Slack-based app that helps you to track and manage your team’s vacations and days off. Both our Slack app and web-based dashboard needed an API, so an AWS Lambda function with an Amazon API Gateway trigger was a logical starting point. API Gateway provides a public API. Each time that the API receives the request, the Lambda function is triggered to answer that request.
Our app is focused on small and medium teams and is the app that you use less than a few times per day. Periodic usage makes the pay-per-use, serverless pricing model a big win for us because both API Gateway and Lambda cost $0 initially."
Read full story: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/serverless-and-startups/
Interesting post thanks I'm also a big fan of serverless.
Do you guys run 100% of your stack on serverless ?
What does your local development flow look like ? I miss having a local dev environment that replicates very closely what I have running in production and I haven't found any solid solutions so far
Almost 100%, there are still some small things that we are migrating to serverless, but most of the things are migrated.
We don't run whole app locally, we run individual services locally, and we have backend environment for each developer, so frontend can point to different APIs for testing easily.
It took some time for our team to get use to that approach, but it doesn't slows us down now. Big part of our app depends on Slack, and you can't run Slack locally anyway.