Infraless cloud explained

Merrymake is an infraless backend (aka compute cloud). But what does that really mean?

Infraless is the latest development of compute backend or cloud platforms. It is closely related to and builds upon serverless computing, but it emphasizes an even greater abstraction of infrastructure. Infraless enables developers to focus on developing their application and deploying it easily and continuously, without managing the underlying cloud resources, networks, or storage, or worrying about the vast and complex array of tools.

Merrymake’s infraless backend takes development and deployment to a whole new level, by being fully managed (incl. built in CI/CD), and new code is deployed with Git or a single command in seconds, instead of minutes.

TL;DR: The benefits of infraless computing

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Infraless builds upon serverless by abstracting away even more infrastructure. It offers automatic scaling, pay-per-use pricing, simplified deployment and higher deployment frequency, easier maintainability, reduced rework, reduced fail rates and failure recovery times (that’s a full plate on DORA’s four keys to software delivery performance, by the way!):

  1. Focus on Core Business/Reduced operational overhead: With infrastructure management handled by the provider, your team can concentrate on building features that deliver value to your customers.
  2. Faster Time-to-Market/accelerated development: Simplified deployment and scaling can significantly reduce the time it takes to get new features into production.
  3. Cost Optimization: Pay-per-use models ensure you're only paying for the resources you actually consume, which can lead to significant savings, especially in the early stages.
  4. Reduced risks: The ability to test in Production enables safe experimentation, and easy deployment enables frequent small updates, and thus quick identification, correction, and rollback of issues.
  5. Built-in Security: Many serverless platforms come with robust security features out of the box, reducing the burden on your team.
  6. Automatic Scaling: These models handle scaling for you, eliminating the need for complex capacity planning.

Key features of an infraless platform

  1. Infrastructure Abstraction: Developers do not need to provision, manage, or scale servers. The cloud provider handles all backend operations, including load balancing, scaling, and system maintenance.
  2. Pay-as-You-Go Model: Users are charged based on actual usage rather than pre-allocated resources. This ensures cost efficiency by eliminating the need to pay for idle capacity.
  3. Event-Driven Execution: Applications or functions are triggered by specific events (e.g., HTTP requests, database updates), and resources are allocated dynamically to handle these events.
  4. Indirect Communication Architecture: Components are decoupled to allow asynchronous processing and easy refactoring and maintainability, risk-free testing in Production, and zero-downtime deployments, aka rolling updates. Watch a 3min 20sec demo here showing building, deploying and refactoring a small service, in real time.‍
  5. Unified Backend Services: Infraless platforms often provide integrated services such as authentication, databases, file storage, caching, and job queues as modular components, simplifying backend development.‍
  6. Automatic Scaling: Resources automatically scale up or down based on demand without manual intervention, ensuring optimal performance during traffic spikes or low usage periods. For ensuring great user experience, lightning-fast cold-starts are required; check out our benchmark of serverless cloud start times.

Comparison to serverless computing

While similar to serverless computing, infraless platforms aim to go further in reducing developer interaction with infrastructure details:

  • Serverless focuses on eliminating server management but still requires some configuration of backend services like databases or API gateways.
  • Infraless takes this a step further by offering pre-configured backend components as "LEGO blocks," streamlining development even more.

If you want more details, you can check out a quick comparison of compute cloud generations here.

Benefits of Merrymake’s infraless backend

  • Enhanced Developer Productivity: By removing infrastructure concerns, developers can concentrate solely on application logic and code. In other words, advance from DevOps to NoOps.
  • Cost Efficiency: The pay-as-you-go model ensures that users only pay for the resources consumed during execution.
  • Faster Time-to-Market: Pre-built services and automated scaling accelerate development and deployment cycles.
  • Reduced risks: The ability to test in Production enables safe experimentation, and easy deployment enables frequent small updates, and thus quick identification, correction, and rollback of issues.
  • Easy maintainability: The indirect communication architecture enables uncomplicated splitting, merging, and refactoring services.
  • Scalability and Resilience: Applications can handle varying workloads seamlessly without manual scaling efforts.

All in all, this enables high performance on all of the DORA Accelerate State of DevOps report's four keys to high software delivery performance: faster lead times, higher deployment frequency, lower failure rates, and faster recovery time from failed deployments.

Use cases

Due to its indirect architecture, instant scalability and suite of features, infraless platforms are particularly well-suited for:

  • Microservice architectures
  • APIs / integrations
  • Real-time data processing
  • Event-driven applications
  • (Recurring) data processing tasks like image processing or data extraction
  • IoT

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Infraless is the next big thing

In summary, an infraless compute backend represents the next evolution in cloud computing by further abstracting infrastructure management and simplifying backend development. This approach aligns with modern trends in cloud-native application development, allowing developers to deploy applications at lightning speed while the platform handles all the operational complexities behind the scenes.

When using Merrymake, you can focus on writing your code, and we keep it running.

If you're ready to run, go straight to the tutorial, or ask your questions on Discord or book a meeting!