Well this is timely.

Just this morning, I’ve been extending a Firebase app I developed for a very large enterprise customer, and I’ve been constantly reminded of some of the things the author speaks about as I tried to recreate the FaaS environment locally.

Not only did I waste valuable time setting everything up locally when the same would’ve been trivial in an old-school web framework; I now have an explosion of environment permutations and smells in my code, and I don’t completely trust that local and prod will behave the same so I will have to do extra testing.

Despite Firebase coming a long way - some of these local emulation facilities plainly didn’t exist or barely worked a couple of years ago - there is no way I would choose it for a new project. The only module that has genuinely saved me time is auth; none of the rest have made me happier or more efficient than a web framework. Even for prototyping (the reason why I picked Firebase initially) I would still pick Django or Express or whatever else over this. (And I haven’t even delved into the big elephant in the room, which is lock-in.)

Regarding costs and scalability there are a gazillion (fairly easy) things I could’ve done to achieve a similar cost range bringing my own stack.

FaaS and the like may have their particular use cases but for anything that has even the slightest potential to turn into a full-blown app I’d go for a good old monolith every time.