You hit the nail on the head. It is all about marketing for the new front-end developers who don't want to learn "server side" manipulation db, files, etc.

Personally the whole indexdb, localstorage really break the web page as a stateless model. Why do you need save so much local data to just maintain the session? Stop putting everything in the web browser.

I can see the value of serverless in general (not this hack necessarily) in small startups that don't have sysadmins on payroll but still want to rapidly deploy products with confidence that it will just work - all without worrying about infrastructure, scaling, etc.

What I'm curious is if (1) serverless is cheaper than hiring competent sysadmins who can maintain the infrastructure instead and (2) are these savings worth being locked into a chaotic architecture and boring proprietary tooling that is forced on you for the profit of the Google, Microsoft, and Amazon monopolies?

I've recently entered the job market and personally find no joy in working in serverless environments because of the latter.

Personally I suspect that the chaotic tooling will waste more dev time than what the sysadmin time will cost you. So that it will be a net loss even before you consider lock-in and fees.

While a good argument in favor of the vendor locked-in serverless services can be made at the start of a project, it looks like a net loss during any other phase of the project.

It comes down to if you want to have generic and reusable sysadmins vs. cloud serverless specialists.

Heroku fits the bill for me. Very easy to manage and scale, still cheaper than an SRE or sysadmin.

You don't need local state to maintain a session other than possibly storing a Token, but that's very small.

Storing data locally is often out of convenience or possibly for cached data for offline support.

There are valid reasons for maintaining local state.

> Why do you need save so much local data to just maintain the session? Stop putting everything in the web browser.

I guess that's to replace the traditional desktop application with something that can be deployed over the web?

Stateless was gone with the invention of cookies and authentication.

I think I heard it first wrt GAE, but I think it was more "wry observation" then than actual "thing".