Brian Zambrano
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

There are some good tips in here which I agree with. However I’d like to point out some misleading advice with respect to the Serverless framework.

The quote you pulled in about the Serverless framework being slow and producing large application bundles is simply false.

Serverless uses Cloudformation to manage resources and upon intitial creation of the entire stack that _can_ take some time, depending on the complexity of your stack. That is purely a function of your stack and to some degree how CF works. Personally I’ve deployed fairly complex stacks very reliably, over and over in a few minutes.

However, it _is_ possible to make incremental changes which are very very fast. When you deloy a single function Cloudformation is not invoked at all. In my experience this takes 1–5 seconds, depending on your upload speeds and package size:

I’m really not sure what the original author of that comment was referring to with respect to “large bundle sizes”. I typically author functions in Python and the size of my application/zip is completely controlled by what packages I’m pulling in. I doubt this is any different in Node. The code which Serverless itself uses to manage itself (via uploading to S3) is quite tiny.

It’s neat to see that you can accomlish your tasks with Terraform; however, I think you need to really be certain you know the facts before talking about the disadvanages of other systems so readers can make a fair comparison.

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    Brian Zambrano

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    Software engineer and architect. Born and bred in the Bay Area, relocated to Colorado. I like software, bicycles and coffee.

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