Read the article to find out, we lay out 6 different benefits.

• 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 look at the benefits of using serverless components and talk about the various advantages that serverless components offer.

The benefits of Serverless Components

1. Reusability
2. Best Practices Baked-in
3. IAC Friendly Language
4. Cloud/Vendor Agnostic
5. Faster Deployments
6. Goodbye, CloudFormation Limitations

Reusability

Serverless components have been described as cloud legos. You can construct use-cases out of these cloud legos and then when you’ve built your use-case. You can cover the use-case in glue. Then pick that use-case up and place it into more robust use-cases or share that use-case internally or externally with the world.

Best Practices Baked-in

Serverless components will be built around best practices. The entire community will contribute to flush out the most optimal configuration of resources.

Thereby eliminating the constant problem where every team is spending countless hours trying to build optimal infrastructure and debug common IAC pitfalls to achieve the same result as a serverless component will have baked-in from the start.

Serverless components will also open the door for the community as a whole to contribute to specific serverless components which will ensure that everyone benefits from each other.

IAC Friendly Language

Serverless components can be written using JavaScript (currently). This lowers the barrier of entry by quite a lot for developers who are coming from code schools or non-cloud backgrounds who are becoming interested in the cloud/serverless space.

Before, these developers would need to understand AWS and the inner workings. Now, these developers can either plug-n-play a pre-built serverless component or build their own in a familiar language.

Cloud/Vendor Agnostic

Serverless components will be cloud and vendor agnostic. Imagine that you’re creating a web application which needs asset storage. Imagine that every asset storage in existence has a serverless component published. Imagine being a developer and writing a single line of code which has the ability to pull in any asset storage component.

Obviously, this is just a simple example. However, a few days ago AWS released the CloudFormation Registry where third-party vendors could create integrations that could easily be used inside CloudFormation stacks and serverless components naturally will have an equal impact.

Faster Deployments

Serverless components in their current state are already increasing deployment speed quite dramatically. I would highly recommend that you take a pass at the serverless website component which demonstrates this in an isolated simple example. Heads up, we will be rolling out an article on the serverless website component in a couple of days.

Goodbye, CloudFormation Limitations

Serverless components are no longer reliant on AWS CloudFormation. This is a great benefit as new releases by the AWS team on a specific service would be slow to have that functionality rolled into AWS CloudFormation.

Meaning that we’ve been plagued with having to create supporting bash scripts that use the AWS CLI to compensate for the lack of AWS CloudFormation functionality. Now with serverless components that’s not an issue as we are writing our IAC using the AWS SDK.

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