The Serverless Stack (SST) framework's recent expansion into container support has ignited discussions within the developer community about the balance between feature richness and simplicity in infrastructure tools. This significant shift from SST's traditionally serverless-focused approach represents a strategic evolution in cloud deployment solutions.
Feature Evolution and Technical Implementation
SST's container support introduces new components including Cluster, Service, and VPC implementations, alongside complementary services like Postgres, Redis, and EFS. The framework leverages Pulumi under the hood, offering a higher-level abstraction that simplifies complex infrastructure deployments. While this abstraction has drawn some criticism regarding implementation visibility, it provides valuable features such as auto-scaling, load balancing configuration, and service discovery registration out of the box.
Cost Considerations and Alternatives
The pricing structure for container deployments differs significantly from SST's serverless offerings. A basic AWS setup using SST's container components costs approximately $17/month, including AWS Fargate ($13/month for 0.25 vCPU, 0.5GB RAM, 20GB SSD) and Load Balancer ($3/month). Community discussions have highlighted more cost-effective alternatives, particularly for smaller projects:
- Traditional VPS providers like Hetzner offer more resources (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 20GB SSD) for around $5/month
- Combined solutions using Coolify Cloud management can still remain under $10/month
Developer Experience Trade-offs
The community's response reveals a complex relationship between feature completeness and ease of use. While SST offers comprehensive multi-cloud support and extensive features, some developers express preference for simpler alternatives like Serverless Framework (SLS) for quick prototyping:
I think SST sometimes gets in its own way with complex IaaC config; if I wanted to do all this then I would reach for Terraform, and part of the appeal of serverless is the low lift to getting to deployed.
Development and Debugging Features
SST's container support includes several developer-friendly features:
- Local development support through the
sst devmultiplexer - VPC tunnel access via
sst tunnelcommand - Integrated logging in the SST Console
- Autodeploy functionality with VPC support
Future Roadmap
The SST team has announced plans to extend container support to additional languages and frameworks, including Rails, Laravel, Python, Elixir, and Go. This expansion demonstrates SST's commitment to becoming a more comprehensive cloud deployment solution while maintaining its developer-friendly approach.
Article Source: Container support Comments Source: Hacker News Discussion