Why am I promoting a 15 year old architecture solution?

I posted a couple blogs about my serverless website. One thing I don’t think I’ve made clear is that this is really old tech – AWS introduced S3 buckets back in 2006 and Cloudfront just a couple years later in 2008. Even jQuery, the Google javascript library I’m using to render my dynamic articles came out in 2006.

Basically, older than the iPhone.

So why am I using this old tech stack and bragging about it like it’s new and cool? Because it supports three core architectural tenets:

• Content should be secure (no one can alter it or destroy it maliciously)
• It should be available (it’s there when someone needs to access it) 
• It needs to be resilient (it’s not going away because a server got restarted or code was bumped).

As developers rely more and more on AI tools that suggest and help create complex systems, we create more potential for failure. Not only that, but the bad guys are also using complex AI tools that can take advantage of these complex systems in lightning speed.

When there is no reason to add extra libraries, more compute power and complex orchestration… don’t add it. And what I find particularly interesting is how often the business requirements don’t need all that compute power and complex software development. We add it because it’s there, not because it is required for the project.

Sometimes we add more complexity because we believe we need it. The idea of loading a 300K json file into the browser and doing all the search there feels… wrong. It feels like it would add latency (kind of a big file just to render a menu). It feels like it would put too much burden on the client system (do all that parsing on a phone?).

But while the core tech stack I built my site on is 15 year old tech, there are things that have changed over the years. Mobile data is faster than cable modems of 18 years ago. Computational power has grown exponentially (thank you, Moore’s Law) and the amount of memory available in the client browser is more than entire computers used to have.

My job has always been about innovation and modernization, but that doesn’t always mean embracing some new tech stack – sometimes utilizing the tools you have had available for years is the creative, innovate and correct solution.