Why Serverless Stacks Are the Future of App Development
March 02, 2022

Harry Brundage
Gadget

Imagine starting your morning with a new business idea and building it out into a fully functional website by the evening. Serverless stacks are making this speed of innovation possible by streamlining the most tedious aspects of application development.

Historically, serverless stacks enabled developers to run code without needing to manage their own servers. And some, like AWS Lambda, still do just that. But today, innovative full-service serverless stacks providers are pushing the envelope of what's possible — providing developers with the environment, tools, libraries, APIs and best practices to build apps more efficiently.

By leaning on a full-service serverless stack, software creators can grow their applications faster, scale with ease and have more time to build innovative features that differentiate their business.

Why Use a Serverless Stack?

Most software is built on the same patterns. Yet, developers continue to rebuild the basics for every application from scratch — from setting up the environment, to deploying databases and production infrastructure, to stitching together must-have features from dozens of modules. While having these boilerplate features are essential, configuring them is time-consuming, tedious and repetitive.

Full-service serverless stacks alleviate the burden of starting an app by pre-building basic configurations and bundling must-have tools in a single environment. Depending on the provider, they may apply fundamental application features automatically — like authentication, data storage or full-text search — with zero effort required from the user. With this technology, developers still have the ability to customize the environment and write their own code. The serverless stack just provides the environment and the toolset to make code creation simpler.

While some may be hesitant to yield control to full-service serverless stacks, this automation is a net positive for developers and follows the general trend of technology evolution: streamlining low-value, repetitive tasks so humans can focus on more interesting, value-adding activities.

For instance, take the database. Nearly every application needs a database, but there was a time when that technology didn't exist. Every time an application was built, developers would manually create code that handled data retrieval and storage.

Then in the 1960s, companies like IBM began offering software that handled data retrieval and storage, which evolved into the database we know today. And with several companies working on database technology, its features, scalability and performance quickly exceeded homegrown data retrieval and storage solutions. By outsourcing this function to a database, developers had more time back in their day to focus on unique features that customers cared about.

The Benefits of a Serverless Stack

Like a database, a full-service serverless stack outsources the creation of an application's undifferentiated aspects. But unlike a database, these services do a whole lot more than fulfill one function.

Full-service serverless stacks enable developers to define data models and write code, while providing access to a set of advanced primitives, like built-in state machines, access control, API generation and integrations to other SaaS platforms — all in one environment.

The primary benefits of this technology include:

Scalability: The burden of starting and scaling a software business is only getting bigger as more options for APIs, GUIs and other technologies become available. With these tools bundled in a centralized environment, it's easier to grow your app. Additionally, in the event of an influx of traffic (say your product blows up on TikTok(link is external) for a few days), serverless stacks will automatically and instantly scale to meet demand so you don't have to turn away customers or buy more equipment.

Cost efficiency: In most cases, it's more cost-efficient to use a serverless stack than not. In addition to the direct costs of maintaining your own servers, there are fewer tedious, manual responsibilities (like configuration tuning) that take up employee time. There are of course exceptions to this rule — like in data analytics where purpose-built databases really shine — but for most applications, the total cost of ownership is lower with a serverless environment.

Innovation: Full-service serverless stacks are especially helpful for individuals pursuing passion projects while working a full-time job or those with multiple businesses. With basic boilerplate features streamlined and tedious tasks eliminated, you can focus time and energy on the good stuff — coding unique business-specific features that catch the attention of customers. This lowers the barrier to entry for app development and entrepreneurship, bringing your unexplored ideas and unfinished projects closer to fruition.

Serverless stacks present a new approach to an old problem of software development and are quickly becoming the default for app creation. Ultimately, full-service serverless stacks alleviate the repetitive parts of application development, so software creators have more time and energy to do the work that interests them.

Harry Brundage is Co-Founder of Gadget
Share this

Industry News

February 25, 2025

Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.18, the latest version of the hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes.

February 25, 2025

Akamai Technologies announced a Managed Container Service designed for companies that want to deliver better experiences by running workloads closer to users, devices, and sources of data.

February 24, 2025

Couchbase announced that its Capella AI Model Services have integrated NVIDIA NIM microservices, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, to streamline deployment of AI-powered applications, providing enterprises a powerful solution for privately running generative (GenAI) models.

February 20, 2025

GitLab announced the general availability of GitLab Duo Self-Hosted.

February 20, 2025

Tigera announced the introduction of several new innovations to Calico, including a new Ingress Gateway capability for Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise, and the launch of Calico Dashboards.

February 20, 2025

Copado introduced three AI-powered DevOps apps for Slack.

February 20, 2025

Gearset announced that it now supports Salesforce's Agentforce.

February 19, 2025

Sonar announced the acquisition of AutoCodeRover, an autonomous AI agent platform for software development.

February 19, 2025

Faros AI announced a collaboration with Microsoft to deliver its AI-powered platform for optimizing engineering workflows on Azure.

February 19, 2025

Apollo GraphQL announced the general availability of Apollo Connectors for REST APIs and new GraphOS platform enhancements — giving enterprises a faster, more efficient way to execute their API strategies.

February 18, 2025

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd.(link is external) announced that its Check Point CloudGuard solution has been recognized as a Leader across three key GigaOm Radar reports: Application & API Security, Cloud Network Security, and Cloud Workload Security.

February 13, 2025

LaunchDarkly announced the private preview of Warehouse Native Experimentation, its Snowflake Native App, to offer Data Warehouse Native Experimentation.

February 13, 2025

SingleStore announced the launch of SingleStore Flow, a no-code solution designed to greatly simplify data migration and Change Data Capture (CDC).

February 13, 2025

ActiveState launched its Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaas) offering to help organizations manage open source and accelerate secure software delivery.

February 12, 2025

Genkit for Node.js is now at version 1.0 and ready for production use.