One of the biggest challenges when adopting serverless today is mastering the developer workflow. “How do I develop locally?”, “How should I test?”, “Should I mock AWS services?”. These are common serverless questions, and the answers out there have been unsatisfying. Until now.

It’s hard to believe, but 10 years ago AWS had only five products. Chief among them, of course, was EC2. Although it feels a little quaint now, back then EC2 was an incredible offering. Anyone could fire up a server in seconds, install some code, and transform that generic server into any service one could imagine.

At Stackery, our engineers live and breathe serverless development every day. Because of this, we are constantly evaluating the current soundbites about it; when a field is expanding this quickly, it’s not uncommon to hear a generous handful of misguided assumptions. So, despite the increasing influence of cloudside development, there are still a number of declarations published every week that seem to amplify some common and outdated misconceptions.

Stackery is a tool to deploy complete serverless applications via Amazon Web Services (AWS). Epsagon monitors and tracks your serverless components to increase observability. Here’s how they can not only work together but improve each other. Let’s start with a scenario: it’s late in the day on Thursday, traffic to your site is way up, and you have reports of problems.

Cognito is AWS’s cloud solution for authentication – if you’re building an app that handles users with passwords, you can use AWS to handle the tricky high-risk security issues related to storing login credentials. No need to go it alone! Pricing is based on your number of monthly active users, and the first 50k users are free. For apps I’ve worked on, we would have been very pleased to grow out of that free tier.

I’m in a position where I converse with our customers and cloud service providers, and I keep track of conversations happening through blogs and social media. I then sift through all this data to identify patterns and trends. Lately, I’ve seen some talk about an architectural pattern that I believe will become prevalent in the near future.

If you even partly believe Marc Andreessen’s 2011 “software is eating the world” comment, it stands to reason that companies who are good at software will be the winners in a digital world. Given this, I find it ironic that little large-scale research has gone into what it takes to be good at software.