Node Interactive North America 2017

Serverless applications are the future of lightweight, scalable, and performant application development. Developers are breaking apart their monolith applications into smaller, purpose-focused microservices. Moving to a “Serverless” environment really refers to migrating a fully-hosted application to use a Function as a Service (FaaS) offering from one of the big cloud platform providers. These functions can then be executed by HTTP, webhooks, and other events that are internal and external to the platform. They also have easy access to any services offered by the cloud platform on which they are deployed.

What if you want to go “serverless,” but don’t know which cloud provider is best for you, your company, or your clients? What if you’ve decided on a cloud platform, but there’s a chance that you may change your mind mid-project? If you change, does that mean that you have to rewrite your application code?

You shouldn’t have to make that commitment. Each provider is different, but the top four: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM BlueMix, and Google Cloud Platform all have similar FaaS, security, database, and storage services. Just as data can be migrated between services, developers should be able to write Node.js microservices once and deploy them similarly on several platforms.

In this talk, I’m going to show how developers can go “serverless” with their Node.js applications and maintain the flexibility that they need in their deployment environment. Using Node.js, Serverless Framework, and provider-specific framework plugins, I’ll demonstrate how the same Node.js microservice can be deployed to four different cloud platforms. Once deployed, each service can then be executed to illustrate how seamless a provider change is to the end user. These tools and deployment methodologies should make developers should feel more confident in adopting a serverless architecture without the concern they may get locked into any particular cloud platform.