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by tomatowurst 1547 days ago
> The ability to move between the frontend, backend, and infrastructure code without having to learn a different language is invaluable to every member of the team.

I'm actually quite skeptical of this claim. Learning a new language isn't really a big deal unless you are using relatively "esoteric" stuff like clojure or datalog which really require an experienced consultant to train your team.

With AWS Chalice, we've been able to ship production scale code (for govcloud) in Python without any one of us breaking the environment by simply using separate staging. We were able to get PHP/Javascript developers to use it with barely any downtime. In fact it was more or less appreciated from the clean and simple nature of Python right from the get go.

This feels like way too much engineering from the get go. Here's my workflow with AWS Chalice and its super basic (I'm open to improvements here).

- checkout code from github

- run localhost and test endpoints written in python (exactly like Flask)

- push to development stage API gateway

- verify it is working as intended and this is when we catch missing IAM roles, we document them. if something is wrong with our AWS setup (we dont use CDK just simply use the AWS console to set everything up once like VPC and RDS)

- push to production stage API gateway

All this shimming, typescript (rule of thumb is > 40% more code for < 20% improvement through less documentation and type errors, only really valid in large teams) separate AWS developer accounts seems overkill.

The one benefit I see from all this extra compartmentalization is if you are working in large teams for a large company with many "clients" (internal and external). you are going to discover missing IAM roles and permissions anyways and is part of being an implicit "human AWS compiler trying different stackoverflow answers" since you are locking yourself into a single vendor.

Some positives I see are CDK but if you are deploying your infrastructure once, I really don't see the need for it, unless you have many infrastructures that can benefit from boilerplate generation.

Happy to hear from all ends of the spectrum, serverless-stack could be something I explore this weekend but there's just so much going on and I'm getting lot of marketing department vibes from reading the website (like idea to ipo and typescript to rule them all) and to top it off going to https://docs.serverless-stack.com/ triggers an antivirus warning about some netlify url ( nostalgic-brahmagupta-0592d1.netlify.app) what is going on here???

1 comments

Wow that antivirus warning on the docs is super weird. It's just a very simple docs site deployed through Netlify. Can you send me a screenshot of what you are seeing? I'll need to dig into it: jay@serverless-stack.com
hi jay,

seems like the issue has been fixed since but it was quite strange. my AV would not let me load the website (similar to how it blocks some websites) as it would detect that netlify address, if you could investigate this that would be great.

will follow up with an email when i get the chance.

Yeah I'm going to send this to the Netlify support. Thanks for the details!