Serverless Development on AWS

Chapter 11. Preparing for the Future with Serverless

We are just getting started with serverless. It has decades of life in front of it.

Jeff Barr

Cattle farmers go through calving season every year, when they welcome many newborn calves. When a calf is born, it gets exposed to an entirely new ecosystem, outside the comfort of its mother’s womb. Its new home is a vast, complex, crowded, and confusing world. It needs a good cleanup (by its mother) before its eyes can sense the new environment.

When you are new to serverless, your experience can be similar to that of a newborn calf. Technology looks complex; you hear opinionated statements; people argue on the definition of serverless; you see everything distributed; many things are managed for you; you get caught in asynchrony, and the world around you becomes event-driven. You feel like you are drowning in serverless. Chapter 1 of this book was an attempt to help you open your eyes and see this technology from a clearer perspective.

Soon, the calf starts seeing things—notably its friends and family members standing on four legs. Its desire to get up and struggle to stand on its own hooves begins. To overcome the challenge and accomplish this tiring act, it must rewire its brain and shift its thinking to see the world around it differently from the stillness of the womb.

The early chapters of the book enriched you with details needed to enable the shift to a serverless mindset, helping you to see technology differently from legacy ...