Let’s Be Scared Of Serverless Together

Fed with being confused by the concept of “Serverless”, I asked Simona Cotin to help me move my API from Express to Azure Functions and we recorded the whole process so you can learn along with me.

Serverless Is A Scary Word

There’s entirely too much terminology thrown around these days to keep up with. We’ve got Serverless, Docker, GraphQL, Kubernetes, Tensorflow, Curtain and many others.

If naming things is hard, terminology is terrifying.

How many of those items above did you know? All of them? Hopefully not that last one because that one I just made up — wait, no, I just checked npmjs.org and there is in fact a package called “Curtain”. There is also one called “Waffles”.

Seriously. You can npm install waffles.

Terminology is unfortunate because it’s just a word used to describe a concept that is relatively simple. It’s just that our brains are good at understanding things, but not so good with abstractions.

And so we look at these terms like that terrifying clown from the IT remake waiting for us in the gutter. DON’T PUT YOUR ARM DOWN THERE HE DOES NOT HAVE YOUR BOAT.

Scary words and clowns aside, what always helps me is to actually implement a solution or use a technology. This is exactly why I recorded the above video and I hope that you find it helpful to at least understand what Serverless actually is.

For more information on what Serverless is NOT, check out the article, “Let’s Be Careful With Serverless”.