Serverless is a Scam
"Wow," somebody thought, "setting up web infrastructure certainly is inconvenient!" They said, "what if people could just push their common, privileged web code from anywhere and automatically distribute it to all corners of the internet with constant uptime?"
YEAH FAT FUCKING CHANCE.
Let's talk convenience: why is deploying serverless by far the slowest part of my company's continuous integration process? It's not because our builds are slow. Our builds take like 30 fucking seconds. It's because Cloudflare and Firebase barely have their shit together.
Let's talk privileged: Cloudflare is the NSA's wet dream. No literally. It's a fucking CIA operation to intercept all web traffic that would otherwise be in TLS and track everyone using your "convenient" web app.
Junk fucking code. Absolutely garbage. Throw it in an incinerator.
Why do I have to wait ten fucking minutes for two lines of code changes to be deployed and available on our preview infra? It's because "serverless" is fucking stupid.
Whoever invented serverless was so busy trying to make the future that they forgot that it is the future and we have hardware so damn good that we now have to spend our time optimizing their garbage software for them. We live in 20 fucking 26. If there isn't a fucking server, where are my 10MB of bundled Ecmascript going to?
I self-host1 a $35 ARM-based server that will boot, pull the action context, compile our server, and start running it faster than it takes to just to run the deploy step our "serverless" infra.
When did software development decide that having access to the hardware running their code was bad, actually? Was it around the same time they decided that brand images should have as few Bezier paths in logos as possible?2
For those who don't know what "self-hosting" means, it's where you buy your own hardware and run things on it as opposed to paying Google to make you believe that 200 status codes come from the volunteer labor from elves in the North Pole when they're not developing Santa's spyware that lets him know which list you're on. 2: These are rhetorical questions. I have answers to these. No, they're not "hurr de hurr political correctness."