Hello, everyone. This is Evangelia. I'm the tech founder and creator of Fioromat Academy, an upskilling academy for frontend engineers. Today, we will talk about how serverless technologies are impacting frontends. Initial spark for this talk was from my former employer, Elastic, where there were lots of developments for the lower level of the architecture in search index and the backend transformation.
However, what does this mean to us, the frontend, the consumption layer? These are a few words about myself, my most recent milestones. I have been almost 20 years in the tech industry. Okay. What is serverless? Does it mean that there is no server? Not actually. It's a misleading word.
Does it mean there is no backend? Actually, backend is changing. It's becoming more lightweight. It's becoming stateless backend. This is what it means. In a few words, it means that the backend is split into stateless, ephemeral units, but we don't manage them anymore.
Let's quickly see how the serverless architecture is operating to then understand the impacts on frontend. We are still the customers, the creators, the builders of the app. But this time, our code talks to an API gateway, but it's not the same API like it used to be in the traditional architectures. The API gateway acts as a router to the smaller serverless functions, not to large endpoints that they are returning huge JSON files that they used to do. It makes sure that it does it in a secure and scalable way. So the serverless functions and the code of this architecture are smaller business units without any state that we still the customers write and own, but the cloud provider is in charge of hosts and scaling keys.
However, we pay them as you go, only when we use them. That means if they became idle for a while, it takes a while to restart them. That's why we end up in cold start situations, similar to how the engine in a car works. And the last is the persistent layer, the database. We still design the data model and the queries for the app. However, the cloud provider is in charge of managing and scaling it. All right. What does this mean to us for frontend? The state is being shifted to frontend and to database layers, actually. We own more state, actually.
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