The Slow, Stealthy Victory of Serverless 2.0 (and PaaS)

If you've been busy focusing on the - let's face it - noise around Kubernetes in recent years you might have missed it happen. While we've been busily solving orchestration and inventing increasingly ergonomic ways to hide YAML, in secret (not really) folks have been figuring out how to ship code to production without worrying about servers and orchestration at all.

It's 2021 and you're creating a new app. You're going to need to store data and process credit cards, and you need an analytics stack obviously and also you're planning a mobile client so you need to provide a GraphQL sync service for that.

You can do that, but you could also just write your code in a git repo and wire it up to something like Netlify (using Next.js or Redwoodjs to bind server-side functions, and use something like Stripe for credit card processing, and then any of a number of cheap, free-to-start data services like Prisma or, recently, PlanetScale). JAMStack – javascript and markup, plus a sprinkle of server-side functions and services like Stripe and Auth0.

Welcome to Serverless 2.0 (aka PaaS 2.0, pick your own marketing name)! Note you didn't spend lots of time messing around directly with FaaS abstractions or setting up API Gateways (and you didn't need to set up a cluster or manage any YAML), you just wrote code and used a couple services.

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