Discussing the "Real" Expectations

Running applications locally

What do we expect from serverless, or for that matter, any type of deployment services?

We expect to be able to develop our applications locally and to run them in clusters. Ideally, local environments would be the same as clusters, but that’s not critical. It’s okay if they’re similar. As long as we can easily spin up the application we’re working on together with the direct dependencies, we should be able to work locally. Our laptops tend to have quite a few processors and gigabytes of memory, so why not use them? That doesn’t mean we exclude development that entirely relies on servers in the cloud, but instead, that we believe the ability to work locally is still essential. That might change in the future, but that future is still not here.

We want to develop and run applications locally before deploying them to other “real” environments. It doesn’t matter much whether those applications are monoliths, microservices, or functions. Similarly, it should be irrelevant whether they’ll be deployed as serverless, as Kubernetes resources, by running as processes on servers, or anything else. We want to be able to develop locally, no matter what that something is.

Common denominator