Articles Tagged serverless

A lot of people are confused about what JAMstack is. The acronym stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup, but truly, JAMstack doesn’t have to include all three. What defines JAMstack is that it’s served without web servers. If you consider the history of computing, this type of abstraction isn’t unnatural; rather it’s the inevitable progression this industry has been moving towards.

So, if JAMstack tends to be static by definition, it can’t have dynamic functionality, server-side events, or use a … Read article

One of my favorite developments in software development has been the advent of serverless. As a developer who has a tendency to get bogged down in the details of deployment and DevOps, it's refreshing to be given a mode of building web applications that simply abstracts scaling and infrastructure away from me. Serverless has made me better at actually shipping projects!

That being said, if you're new to serverless, it may be unclear how to translate the things that … Read article

Building and maintaining your own website is a great idea. Not only do you own your platform, but you get to experiment with web technologies along the way. Recently, I dug into a concept called serverless functions, starting with my own website. I’d like to share the results and what I learned along the way, so you can get your hands dirty, too!… Read article

Hey, let's create a functional calendar app with the JAMstack

I’ve always wondered how dynamic scheduling worked so I decided to do extensive research, learn new things, and write about the technical part of the journey. It’s only fair to warn you: everything I cover here is three weeks of research condensed into a single article. Even though it’s beginner-friendly, it’s a healthy amount of reading. So, please, pull up a chair, sit down and let’s have an adventure.… Read article

I created a website called The Power of Serverless for Front-End Developers over at thepowerofserverless.info a little while back while I was learning about that whole idea. I know a little more now but still have an endless amount to learn. Still, I felt like it was time to revamp that site a bit.

For one thing, just like our little conferences website, the new site is a subdomain of this very site:

https://serverless.css-tricks.com/… Read article

I want you to take a second and think about Twitter, and think about it in terms of scale. Twitter has 326 million users. Collectively, we create ~6,000 tweets every second. Every minute, that’s 360,000 tweets created. That sums up to nearly 200 billion tweets a year. Now, what if the creators of Twitter had been paralyzed by how to scale and they didn’t even begin?

That’s me on every single startup idea I’ve ever had, which is … Read article

I love the idea of programmatically generated images. That power is close at hand these days for us front-end developers, thanks to the concept of headless browsers. Take Puppeteer, the library for controlling headless Chrome. Generating images from URLs is their default use case:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  await page.screenshot({path: 'example.png'});

  await browser.close();
})();

That ought to get the ol' mind grape going. … Read article

Oh no! Not more jargon! What exactly does the term Durable Functions mean? Durable functions have to do with Serverless architectures. It’s an extension of Azure Functions that allow you to write stateful executions in a serverless environment.

Think of it this way. There are a few big benefits that people tend to focus on when they talk about Serverless Functions:

• They’re cheap
• They scale with your needs (not necessarily, but that’s the default for many services)
• They allow you

You clever dog. You've rooted it out! It turns out when you build things with serverless technology you're still using servers. Pardon the patronizing tone there, I've seen one-too-many hot takes at this point where someone points this fact out and trots away triumphantly.

And yes, because serverless still involves servers, the term might be a bit disingenuous to some. You could be forgiven for thinking that serverless meant technologies like web workers, which use the client to … Read article