So Easy You Could Run It Yourself

Jul 9, 2022

What happens when software becomes so easy to deploy that you could run it yourself?

For instance, this blog could be reduced to probably ~100 lines of reusable AWS CDK that anyone could deploy. You wouldn't really have to do much maintenance – the static files are hosted on a CDN, and the dynamic parts have a small surface area. There are enough serverless cloud services to make sure you really only need to worry about application-level errors – not the mail server going down (AWS SES) or the server going down (no servers).

We're not there yet. But it becomes easier every day. Could deploying a frontend framework like Next.js be as simple as a reusable template that deploys the static files to a CDN and the dynamic ones to serverless runtime? Maybe one day.

But already,

No more thinking about hardware (cloud).
No more thinking about servers (serverless).
No more installing dependencies (Docker).
No more configuring infrastructure (CDK).
No more worrying about transient failures (ephemeral/fault-tolerant design).

Maybe one day, there will be a day of reckoning for the "simplest" managed services that have become so easy you could run them yourself.