>When I first started, I went from "never wrote an HTTP endpoint" to "wrote a secured HTTP endpoint that connects to my DB" in under 20 minutes.
You could have had the exact same experience with Heroku or many other similar products that have been around for almost a decade and a half--it has nothing to do with serverless.
>The sheer PITA of maintaining multiple environments and teaching build scripts what files to pull in on both my website and mobile app is enough work that I don't want to have to manage yet another set of build scripts. I don't want to spin up yet another set of VMs for each environment and handle replicating secrets across them. I just want a 30 line JS function with 0 state to get called now and then.
It sounds like your architecture is far too complicated if you're managing all this by yourself. You don't need "a set of VMs" per environment if you're a small start up.
>Everything will work and keep working pretty much forever, without me needing to touch it.
If you believe that, you haven't been doing this long enough.
> You could have had the exact same experience with Heroku or many other similar products that have been around for almost a decade and a half--it has nothing to do with serverless.
See below with Ander.
I don't have much infra, I don't need infra.
(I do in fact have a couple of VMs because I do have a service that is stateful.)
Not having to think about anything aside from "here is my code, it runs" is nice. Debugging consists of "did I write bad code?"
> It sounds like your architecture is far too complicated if you're managing all this by yourself. You don't need "a set of VMs" per environment if you're a small start up.
For the few things I run on VMs I still have to manage secrets so they can connect to the right DB. I also need to point my apps to the proper environment. The app being dev'd on my phone needs to point to the dev server with the dev DB secrets stored on it. Same goes for the website on localhost, or the website on the development server.
In an ideal world I'd have a script that created new environments on demand and it'd wire up all the build scripts automatically. Every developer would trivially get their own VM and could switch parts of the software (website, app, services) to point to various environments easily.
Why in the bloody world some build systems hard code only 2 options in is beyond me.
> If you believe that, you haven't been doing this long enough.
Sure old runtimes will be deprecated, but let's compare that to:
1. Setting up nginx
2. Setting up letsencrypt
3. Figuring out why my certs auto-renew but nginx doesn't pick them up (Turns out default setup doesn't actually force nginx to pick up the certs!)
4. Learning about various process management tools for JS to keep my services running
5. Setting up alerts for aforementioned daemons.
5b. Probably involves configuring outbound email.
6. Realizing something went horribly wrong in 5b and my inbox is now flooded with alerts.
7. Writing scripts to automate as much of the above as possible.
8. This legit happened, there was a security fix to SCP on Windows that changed how one of the command line parameters worked, breaking my deployment scripts when running them from Windows.
9. Does Google really want to charge me per decryption to store my API keys in their cloud API key storage service? They have to make money, but ouch.
10. Security updates not just for code, but for the VM images.
Like, I get it, if my entire job is back-end development. But I want to write some functions that maybe hit double digit millisecond run times and throw away all their state after.
Firebase says "here, export some functions, we'll give you an HTTPS URL you can call them at."
That is the sum total of my relationship with the tooling. "Run my code." "Sure."
About the only other thing that works that simply is a headphone jack, and those are going away.
Again, none of this has anything to do with serverless architecture vs non-serverless architecture. There are many PaaS providers that would eliminate all of your complaints that aren't "serverless". They just manage the server for you. But you still write a normal app that you can easily run locally or port anywhere you want.
If you decide you don't like the service, you're app isn't tied to a proprietary API or architecture.
And you don't need to manage additional VMs for stateful services.
You could have had the exact same experience with Heroku or many other similar products that have been around for almost a decade and a half--it has nothing to do with serverless.
>The sheer PITA of maintaining multiple environments and teaching build scripts what files to pull in on both my website and mobile app is enough work that I don't want to have to manage yet another set of build scripts. I don't want to spin up yet another set of VMs for each environment and handle replicating secrets across them. I just want a 30 line JS function with 0 state to get called now and then.
It sounds like your architecture is far too complicated if you're managing all this by yourself. You don't need "a set of VMs" per environment if you're a small start up.
>Everything will work and keep working pretty much forever, without me needing to touch it.
If you believe that, you haven't been doing this long enough.