Trying out Serverless Stack/SST

For as long as I’ve been building serverless apps on AWS, the Serverless Framework has been my go-to tool of choice for deploying them. And it has served me and my clients well.

However, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the future of serverless adoption, and DX and tooling is one of the areas that needs to improve. Which is why I’m deciding to finally try out Serverless Stack (SST) with a view to potentially using it as my default IaC framework going forward.

I’ve been following SST for quite a while now but their recent announcement of their v1.0 release seemed like a good time for me to dive in deeper.

There are a few things specifically that I really like about their platform:

• It’s been built by a team who had deep knowledge and experience of using the Serverless Framework, and brought along the good points of it into SST
• Fast developer experience with a live Lambda debugger that allows local debugging of a remote Lambda function
• Optimised for TypeScript and strong IDE integration
• Still deploys to my AWS accounts so my clients are not tied in to a third party hosted service
• Builds on top of proven tech in CDK and CloudFormation
• Improves on the CDK by providing higher-level constructs with smart defaults which use a functional rather than OOP idiom
• Is extensible in that it still allows using raw CDK constructs if needed
• It has great docs in general, and specifically for how to migrate to SST from Serverless Framework, including several of the common plugins that I rely on
• Their support community in Slack is great and I got an answer to my question yesterday in under 1 minute!

And from talking to devs on their core team (especially Dax Raad), I’m excited about the direction they’re heading in, with the addition of GraphQL capabilities and the possibility of moving even higher in the stack with more application-level features on top of IaC.

I’ll write more on my experiences with using SST in some of these emails to you over the next while, but if you’re interested in learning more in the mean time, they hosted a virtual conference yesterday with a load of great talks from folks building with SST. You can watch the recording here.