Databases and transactional backends are the heartbeats of our everyday lives - they power nearly every transaction in the modern world, from booking airplane tickets to ordering food on Doordash. The status quo of powering these transactions today is building on top of a microservices-heavy architecture -- by leveraging caches and queues to preserve transaction state and OLTP that guarantees idempotency and consistency. The next evolution of this stack is replacing cache/queues with a central orchestrator -- workflow engines like cadence and conductor. This all happened in what we traditionally call "the backend", but a new stack is emerging for the Javascript world: more and more greenfield projects are written only in Javascript/Typescript, and this group of projects share a unique stack unlike what we have seen previously. The presentation will dive into the history and evolution of platform shifts, and focus on the most exciting transactional problems presented in the modern monoliths world that's edge-native, 100% Javascript -- and argue why the word "serverless" is out of date :)
