We live in the golden age of cloud computing. For consumers, it’s a wonder. For developers, it’s a complete and utter mess.
For all the problems with monolithic application architectures (and there are many), they’re relatively straightforward: Take an app server and database and wire them to a browser interface. Simple! By contrast, today’s applications depend on an ever-changing array of back-end microservices, first-party and third-party APIs, databases, etc., with an assortment of front-end landing zones for that data (browser, set-top box, mobile app, etc.) Even as React and other front-end frameworks have made front-end development easier, connecting the sometimes bewildering back-end complexity to that front-end experience has gotten harder.
