They can have backends too, not just stuff rendered for the client
You can also have those discreet compute instances as well, Netlify I think just recently introduced this, not sure how recent
To my knowledge the only thing missing is a persistent storage solution, so you still need a database elsewhere but your api can read and write to it
I personally dont do system design that way with my “web3” sites, as these are basically frontends to smart contracts, so I’m essentially using nearby nodes as compute instances and users pay to update the state of the compute instances and what the client therefore displays. Surprisingly economical for developers, I see that model attracting more devs very quickly as the stack and deployment is less complicated and cheaper and customers are already there.
You can also have those discreet compute instances as well, Netlify I think just recently introduced this, not sure how recent
To my knowledge the only thing missing is a persistent storage solution, so you still need a database elsewhere but your api can read and write to it
I personally dont do system design that way with my “web3” sites, as these are basically frontends to smart contracts, so I’m essentially using nearby nodes as compute instances and users pay to update the state of the compute instances and what the client therefore displays. Surprisingly economical for developers, I see that model attracting more devs very quickly as the stack and deployment is less complicated and cheaper and customers are already there.