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Serverless / Cloud Functions - Part 1

In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes talk about serverless and cloud providers - the benefits, limitations, providers and more!

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Show Notes

4:05 - What is Serverless?

  • URL driven
  • Startup/shut down (Heroku works this way)
  • Digital Ocean droplet works differently

8:15 - What are the benefits?

  • Scale up specific functions rather than everything - aka potentially cheaper
  • Security - your singular server instance being hacked is not a possibility
  • Less knowledge overhead required
    • You don’t need to manage your own server
    • Empowers front-end devs to do more
  • Faster deploys
    • Only re-deploy the code that changed

17:05 - What can you host on Serverless?

  • Static Files - SPA (React)
  • Single functions
  • It can be in JS, Python, GO, PHP

18:07 - What can’t you host on Serverless?

  • Entire applications
  • Large apps have slow coldstarts
  • 500mb limit

23:40 - Raw Providers

  • Google Cloud
  • Azure
  • AWS Lambda
  • SAP
  • Red Hat
  • IBM Cloud Functions
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • Kind of cool because they work like service workers where you can intercept any HTTP request

27:33 - Easy Providers + Frameworks

  • Begin + Arc.codes
  • Zeit Now + Next.js
  • Anything + Serverless
  • Netlify
  • AWS Amplify
  • Apex Up - TJ Holowaychuk
  • Open Faas + Digital Ocean
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