I used to work in Cloud, I used to work on a Functions-as-service product (Firebase Functions). Customers kept complaining about the same things:
- Deploy times are too long
- Cold starts are too slow
- Hard to debug
- Hard to mock
As a Cloud consultant for all three major clouds, I also heard customers complain in general about
- The unlimited risk of a big bill from Cloud providers.
- Opaqueness of operation
I have decided to try and fix all this with a niche Cloud product.
1) It uses Observable browser-based notebooks as the programming environment, so no tools to set up and you can program from anywhere from any device (I like to use my phone in the bath :) ).
2) A static function fetches handler source code from a notebook on demand. There is NO DEPLOY STEP.
3) Front end and backend can seamlessly share code, meaning you can test most of your business logic client-side.
4) Multi-tenancy fat function architecture with concurrency. Everybody shares the same runtime so less cold starts in aggregate.
I have not implemented billing yet, but I will offer a pay-as-you-go method so people who do not want to hand over a blank cheque to their infra provider can use this instead.
It's built on top of Google Cloud technology like Cloud Run. You get production level logging as I can grant conditional access to the real Google Cloud Logging Explorer.
Let me know what you think https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/serverless-cells-quickstart It takes about 30 seconds to create a custom endpoint. Happy hacking!
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