Don’t wait for Functionless. Write less Functions instead

Less is more?

During my school days I used to get confused by the saying, “less is more”. It puzzled me for a very long time. I remember trying to analyse the statement and asking myself “how is 2 more than 5?”. Those days I feared to ask my English teacher the meaning as I thought she might think I sounded stupid. Many years later, I am still baffled by the same saying, especially when I read statements such as, “… in serverless less is more”. So what does it exactly mean? I was determined to find out.

The definition for the phrase “less is more” varied depending on where I looked. One definition said,

‘less is more’ is used to express the view that a minimalist approach to artistic or aesthetic matters is more effective.

To my humble brain, that sounded complicated to digest. So I searched again and found the following —

‘less is more’ means that having just the essential things is better than having way too much of superfluous things. It allows you to focus on what matters.

Though not convincing, I was getting closer but then I found the following that made me to feel at ease. I halted my search there!

Simplicity is better than elaborate embellishment; Sometimes something simple is better than something advanced or complicated.

The Functionless fantasy

In recent months, especially after the popular adoption of serverless, experts have been prophesying and urging the service providers to get to a state of Functionless. This is like the ‘Lambda Nirvana’; where you no longer hand code your functions and instead somehow knit the services using out of the box features to make things work the way we want them to work.

Though it sounds interesting and certainly a fantasy, the term Functionless, as the next evolutionary stage of Serverless, is far from being becoming a 100% reality. Similar to a natural evolutionary process, this will also take time before serverless as a technology matures and gets somewhat closer to being fully functionless.

Should that disappoint anyone? Absolutely not! Why, you may ask. Because, we have within our limited powers to…