From my perspective, Netlify provides a huge productivity boost for developing small static apps by eliminating backend infrastructure management. However, there are a few consistent features that clients ask for in these kinds of apps that have historically pushed us to use Django instead of developing a static app:
Admin login, along with admin-specific views
Advanced search
Data collection via forms
Any others that I'm missing?
Netlify provides "serverless" add-ons for accomplishing each of these tasks in the form of Functions, Forms, and Identity. I'd like to spend some time building a toy app that uses each of these add-ons in order to evaluate how feasible it would be for us to deploy similar projects without a backend server.
Key questions include:
Do the add-ons work as advertised?
How difficult are they to learn?
What are the limitations of the add-ons? Which small-to-medium sized projects would not be good candidates?
How reasonable is the pricing? At what scale would these add-ons cease to be free (or at least cheaper than two EC2 instances)?
Proposal
I propose a rapid R&D project to build a toy project that integrates each of the Netlify add-ons for admin login, search, and data collection.
I still haven't yet decided which project it would be best to develop against. I'll start by reading Forms, Auth, and Serverless Functions on Gatsby and Netlify, and I may use the app designed in that article as a sandbox for trying things. But ideally I'd like to pick a DataMade project that I could quickly port to a static app and test these features against. Recommendations are welcome.
Deliverables
A sample app hosted on Netlify with admin login, advanced search, and data collection via forms
A lunch&learn report-back answering the key questions above
Timeline
I plan to start this project on Friday 4/26. My first priority will be rapid prototyping to test whether these add-ons are useable at all. If the add-ons seem promising, I'll continue work on a custom project and finish it on Friday 5/10.
Follow-up blog post with my findings here: https://jeancochrane.com/blog/netlify-identity-dealbreakers I focused mostly on Identity because it turned out to be pretty confusing and it was the add-on that I had the least experience with.
TL;DR: Identity isn't ready for prime-time yet, which drags the whole system down. Functions provide a nice and easy way to deploy simple AWS Lambda functions -- I would be interested in trying them out for dynamic search, but they don't yet integrate well with Identity in dev, which means we can't use them for admin views.
I think the next step in this research is to focus exclusively on deploying Functions for search, but I'll leave that for another R&D issue.
@jeancochrane commented on Mon Apr 22 2019
Motivation
From my perspective, Netlify provides a huge productivity boost for developing small static apps by eliminating backend infrastructure management. However, there are a few consistent features that clients ask for in these kinds of apps that have historically pushed us to use Django instead of developing a static app:
Netlify provides "serverless" add-ons for accomplishing each of these tasks in the form of Functions, Forms, and Identity. I'd like to spend some time building a toy app that uses each of these add-ons in order to evaluate how feasible it would be for us to deploy similar projects without a backend server.
Key questions include:
Proposal
I propose a rapid R&D project to build a toy project that integrates each of the Netlify add-ons for admin login, search, and data collection.
I still haven't yet decided which project it would be best to develop against. I'll start by reading Forms, Auth, and Serverless Functions on Gatsby and Netlify, and I may use the app designed in that article as a sandbox for trying things. But ideally I'd like to pick a DataMade project that I could quickly port to a static app and test these features against. Recommendations are welcome.
Deliverables
Timeline
I plan to start this project on Friday 4/26. My first priority will be rapid prototyping to test whether these add-ons are useable at all. If the add-ons seem promising, I'll continue work on a custom project and finish it on Friday 5/10.
@jeancochrane commented on Thu May 02 2019
Follow-up blog post with my findings here: https://jeancochrane.com/blog/netlify-identity-dealbreakers I focused mostly on Identity because it turned out to be pretty confusing and it was the add-on that I had the least experience with.
TL;DR: Identity isn't ready for prime-time yet, which drags the whole system down. Functions provide a nice and easy way to deploy simple AWS Lambda functions -- I would be interested in trying them out for dynamic search, but they don't yet integrate well with Identity in dev, which means we can't use them for admin views.
I think the next step in this research is to focus exclusively on deploying Functions for search, but I'll leave that for another R&D issue.