Serverless vs. Kubernetes

Why would you need Kubernetes when there are offers like Vercel, Netlify, or AWS Lambda/Amplify that basically manage everything for you and offer even more?

Well, let’s try to look at both approaches and draw our own conclusions!

A quick look at Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a container orchestrator and thus needs containers, to begin with. It’s a paradigm shift to more traditional software development, where components are developed, and then deployed to bare metal machines or VMs.

There are additional steps now: Making sure your application is suited to be containerized (12-factor apps, I look at you: https://12factor.net), containerizing the application, following some pretty well-proven standards, and then pushing the image to a registry.

After all that, you need to write specs that instruct Kubernetes what the desired state of your application is, and finally let Kubernetes do its work. It’s certainly not a NoOps platform, as you’ll still need people knowing what they do and how to handle Kubernetes.

A quick look at (some!) serverless offerings

The offer is pretty simple: You write the code, the platform handles everything else for you. It’s basically leaning far to the NoOps side. There is not much to manage anymore.

Take your Next.js / Nuxt.js app, point the platform (Vercel e.g.) to the repository, and then it does its magic. It handles deployment, it handles scaling, it offers metrics, it offers a lot. Sounds like a great offer, doesn’t it?

Or take Amplify for example. It offers an integrated full-stack experience. Simply use the CLI to add an API, or drop your functions into a special folder and let Amplify handle setting up Lambda for you. No need to do everything manually anymore, and also nearly a NoOps experience. Devs can focus on what they want to focus on.

Understanding the author’s perspective

Before we’re going into comparison, I want you to understand my perspective. As objective as I try to be, I have my own experience which may differ vastly from yours.