Seeing how far I can take the whole "serverless" magic

You've probably heard about this trend now. Servers are so last decade. The future (ok I'm exaggerating a little) is all about being serverless.

No more managing servers, or provisioning, or making sure that you're utilizing the cores on your provisioned machines to the full.

Use as many off the shelf tools to make a simple guest book where people can enter their name, and a cute message (although knowing the harsh internet it'll turn in to a troll fest in no time). Don't involve a server, ever.

For hosting the static content, I chose Firebase hosting. I would have loved to simply use GCS, and not involve Firebase at all, but GCS doesn't let one serve HTTPS end to end for custom domains, and we're not trying to have a less than fort knox secure experience here, because guest books are important.

This document will walk you through setting up a static website with Firebase hosting, and serve it on your custom domain with end to end HTTPS.

Note: I am not a Javascript developer, this is my first time using Node, and my whole goal was to minimize the amount of Javascript or Node things I have to do (and use Python instead).

Google Cloud Functions! For actually doing the "work" on this website, I chose Google Cloud Functions. Using app engine to actually do the work would be cheating, and Cloud Functions are serverless, so perfect fit!

This document will walk you through setting up a cloud function that accepts the names for the guest book, and the message, and stores them.

I couldn't not talk about the other buzz phrase - "Edge Computing". Having been a long time Cloudflare customer, I actually helped them Beta Test and launch Cloudflare workers, an awesome solution for "edge computing", taking this serverless stuff to a whole other level. Unfortunately, for the purpose of this project, I can't afford to pay for Cloudflare or for Workers, so you'll just need to imagine that I used workers to do something funky, and I'll explain workers and some examples in this doc. Here's a fun news release about me using workers in the mean time ;)