One of the biggest frustrations I've had prying through Darklang [1], Firebase [2], Supabase [3], and a slew of other low-code projects is that although they do help me build backends faster, they come with a big tradeoff of having to deal with either (a) vendor lock-in, (b) tie-in to specific tools/databases/coding patterns, or (c) a large monthly bill.
At the same time, coding without these tools, I would have to deal with either configuration hell [4] with Kubernetes/Istio/Consul or take the time to stitch a bunch of libraries together and spend a lot of time having to deal with devops/networking/backend architecture myself.
So, I built this framework called Flatend over the last two months for Mozilla Spring MVP Labs, which:
1) lets you write functions using any tools/databases/programming languages/frameworks/hosting environments, and
2) turn them into microservices stitched together into a mesh network with service discovery/load balancing/routing using the Kademlia p2p overlay networking protocol popularized in BitTorrent/Ethereum [5].
Taking advantage of p2p networking, Flatend has taken off a lot of the pains and time spent dealing with bidirectional RPC, service discovery, load balancing, scaling, deployment patterns, and end-to-end-encryption, and has led me to spending more of my time writing productive business logic code in NodeJS/Go.
Using Flatend I've now deployed four different sites/apps racking roughly 200k+ visitors on two 5$ DigitalOcean instances, doing red/blue deployments and upgrades to my microservices really easily.
But that being said, Flatend still is very much experimental and is a heavy work in progress.
Nonetheless, I still do hope for Flatend to be immeasurably useful for the people here at HN looking to speed up the backend development of their next product/service.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985429
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661391
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901