The future of serverless development.

• What are Serverless Components?
• Why use Serverless Components?
• What are the benefits of Serverless Components?
• How to use Serverless Components?
• Serverless Framework vs Serverless Components (coming soon)

This article is part of a series of related articles which dive into serverless components, we hope you enjoy.

In this article we will define what serverless components are and what the impact of serverless components could have on the future of serverless development.

What are serverless components?

Serverless Components is a new release from the folks at Serverless Inc. and is currently in beta. Serverless components allow you to bypass the restraints of AWS CloudFormation and build out reusable templates around a specific use case via JavaScript using a paradigm you’re probably already familiar with.

Serverless components are based on the same structure as ReactJS components which means you’re able to reference individual components or compose components together. The benefit of composing components together is you benefit from leveraging existing components while sprinkling on your specific needs.

What is the goal of serverless components?

The goal when creating serverless components is to encapsulate best practices around architecture and organization rules into a series of reusable low-touch components. This will allow development teams to focus even less on the underlying infrastructure and maintain standardization across multiple distributed teams.

The Serverless Guru team and me personally have been deep in the serverless component weeds over the past few weeks and we are coming back up with an optimistic long term view on serverless components as a new more modern way to build infrastructure. The offering is still early on which means like all things, there will be gaps at first, but the benefits of leveraging the component-style structure and the AWS SDK versus CloudFormation has a slew of benefits.

The gaps will gradually be addressed and in my mind serverless components will be synonymous with serverless development in the near future.

How does this help serverless adoption?

When you build serverless applications, you’re building IAC (Infrastructure as Code). The Serverless Framework helped teams streamline the process of creating infrastructure by offering a simplified structure that wraps over AWS CloudFormation.

This has worked really well, however most of the serverless applications that we build require the usage of native AWS CloudFormation along side the Serverless Framework and this overhead has led to another layer of complexity.

The additional layer of complexity, revolves around understanding how AWS CloudFormation works, how to debug it, and the general fall on your face lessons that everyone has to experience before becoming proficient.

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