Full stack in a stackless world

Description

Software applications today commonly integrate multiple backend services. Increasingly, consumers and business customers alike have high expectations for integrated data experiences. They expect to use a login they already have (SSO or social login) that pulls in relevant data from connected systems and displays it in a personally relevant way.

Behind the scenes, backend systems create data models that consume data which needs to be distilled into a form that humans can reason about or simply kept up to date when changes happen in other systems. Most modern apps integrate with many different third-party APIs and rely on them for core functionality.

Traditionally a full stack developer implements a three-tiered stack of frontend, compute, and storage. Thomas Bouldin and Sarah Allen demonstrate how to use server-side events to combine APIs and serverless compute in a way that makes scaling a bit easier and requires developers to think differently about architecture. On the frontend, it is similar; however, server-side events allow developers to put their compute logic after the API call, so the compute is no longer the middle tier—hence the idea this is “stackless.”