Serverless fosters small autonomous teams

I’ve been focusing specifically on serverless for almost four years now. While there are many good reasons to choose serverless, for me there is one benefit that is head and shoulders over the others and continues to drive me: serverless empowers small teams of autonomous developers to move fast and build great products.

I’ve always enjoyed working on small teams and have been happiest when I’ve been able to take a new feature idea, design and build it out and then see it right through to production independently, without asking anyone else for help or permission. I felt much more ownership of the product I was building and invested in its overall success.

Because of all the concerns that serverless takes away, many dev teams won’t need a full-time dedicated infrastructure or ops engineer since the skillset and time required to provision and manage the full system has greatly reduced. This fosters smaller teams with greater developer autonomy and iteration potential. This could be in startups or it could be in small teams within larger organisations.

This tweet from Nader Dabit from almost two years ago has stuck with me:

By improving the DX of, and lowering the barrier to entry to, back end APIs & services that scale to enterprise level demand, you open the door to a generation of new developers who can for the first time ever build the next big thing & expect it to work if their idea takes off.

We’re still not totally there with the DX and there are still gaps in developer education to be filled, but I believe we’re on the right road.

What about you — if you had to name only one, what would be your single biggest reason for choosing serverless?