The Serverless Revolution Has Stalled
Here&#x27;s why I love serverless.<p>I cannot tell you the number of times I have implemented &quot;upload your photo and it&#x27;ll get resized to (profile avatar size from design specs)&quot;. It&#x27;s ridiculous, and it&#x27;s one of those things that everyone burns time implementing their fun hook into Imagemagick. Now I have one lambda that gets pointed at a new record stream from an S3 bucket, and I&#x27;m done.<p>I cannot tell you the number of times I have implemented &quot;when this user signs up, send them a welcome email.&quot; It&#x27;s one of those things where you construct your email, point it at your MTA, do a ton of configuration, then it may work. Now I have one lambda that gets pointed at a new record stream from Dynamo, which calls SES, and I&#x27;m done.<p>I cannot tell you the number of times I have implemented &quot;clear the Redis cache if a user changes their preferences&quot;. You write a clearUserCache hook into your DAO, or you paste it manually into your crud functions, and you always forget something, and six months down the line you start getting bug reports of people&#x27;s zip code not updating, or something. Now I have one lambda that takes record streams from Dynamo, removes a key from Elasticache, and I&#x27;m done.<p>It&#x27;s not that you couldn&#x27;t do this before serverless, of course you could and you still can. It&#x27;s that it makes that level of code reuse that much simpler. You have all of these helper infrastructure functions that you implement for every single project you work on, and reusing that glue code is so, so much easier in Lambda&#x2F;GCF&#x2F;AF&#x2F;etc.