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by kall 1494 days ago
Isn't an average next app pretty much a monolith? It gets split into lambdas when you deploy it, but the development experience feels monolithic to me.

If I want to use some function, I often just import it and call it directly, instead of calling one serverless function from another over http. That means the function gets bundled into a few lambdas, but so far, I've had no issues with that. The monolith abstraction hasn't really leaked for me.
1 comments
dfee 1494 days ago
I'm all for a monorepo – or to a lesser degree, utility functions that are re-usable across components. That's not what I'm talking about.

Running NextJS as a handful of lambdas is fine, but you still likely need to initialize other services in the background (like databases)... otherwise you have a monolithic front-end... as in: "my monolithic front end talks to my monolithic back end, so I really have two micro/macro services", and maybe I should investigate breaking the FE/BE down into smaller components".

sure, you can use pgbouncer, etc. but it becomes sorta cost prohibitive to run a few apps.

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kall 1494 days ago
Monolith + a database, that's always implied, isn't it?

How you make the database connection work with serverless connection requirements seems like a minor issue. I haven't used it but it seems like next + prisma (+ tailwind lol) is the default stack of tutorial writers these days.

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dfee 1494 days ago
"How you make the database connection work with serverless connection requirements seems like a minor issue."

It's really not. See... databases like PostgreSQL aren't designed for an infinite number of simultaneous connections (doing things like, checking for a logged in user, and auth). This is where something like pgbouncer comes in – that at least takes care of transaction boundaries – because we're a monolith, remember?

Now you're also setting up the state of your application as global variables. Seems like a pretty poor choice, and now you also need to figure out the gotchas with HMR here.

Let's not even get into the fact that a lot of code isn't meant to be (or cannot be) bundled by webpack. So now you're resorting to a custom Webpack config to exclude certain modules. [0]

On AWS, pgbouncer is called "RDS Proxy" and runs you $11.16/mo. [1]

That's not even getting into the cognitive overhead of just "rolling out an app over a weekend" now being a weekend adventure in and of itself – again managing an alphabet soup of services either all within AWS or between AWS and Vercel.

[0] https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/next.config.js/custom-...

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/rds/proxy/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3

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