Serverless is my default architecture, and has been for most of the last decade. You pay for what your system actually uses, there are no servers for anyone to patch, and the platform absorbs changes in load without someone having to predict them in advance. For the majority of business systems, that’s simply the right starting point.
Contact me about your serverless project — building one, or making sense of one you already have.
What I can do for you
- Build a serverless system on AWS or GCP end to end, including the infrastructure, the application and the deployment pipeline.
- Take on a serverless estate that has become hard to reason about, and get it back to something you can change safely.
- Move an existing system onto serverless where that genuinely makes it cheaper or simpler to run, and say so where it doesn’t.
- Add the test coverage that makes changing a serverless system routine rather than nerve-racking.
You get one engineer who holds the whole system, so there’s nobody for a problem to be handed off to and no team for you to coordinate. I’ve done this work as Principal Engineer at Freetrade, on a platform running entirely on Cloud Functions and Firebase, and on AWS Lambda at Fanalysis and Octopus Energy.
What serverless actually costs you
Serverless is not free of trade-offs, and I’ve written about the biggest one. Coupling to a cloud provider is real, cold starts matter for some workloads, and a system built as thirty functions with no thought about the wiring between them is harder to reason about than the monolith it replaced.
The way through is to treat the connections between functions — the queues, topics, event buses and streams — as the actual design, rather than an afterthought. That’s where the behaviour of the system lives.
Testing serverless systems
The usual complaint about serverless is that it’s hard to test. That’s fair, and it’s why I wrote @kensio/yulin, an open source package that simulates AWS in-process so one fast test can cover behaviour across several services at once.
Hire a freelance serverless developer
Contact me about building a serverless system on AWS or GCP, or a complete MVP built this way.
