Serverless Full‑Stack Development: Project Management, Architecture, and Deployment Practices

This article shares practical experience from a project‑engineering perspective on building full‑stack applications with Serverless. It is intended for small‑ to medium‑size projects and can be used directly or adapted to specific needs.

Step 1 – Deciding to Use Serverless

The author first discusses the advantages of Serverless for small projects: low cost, reduced personnel requirements, fine‑grained performance tuning, and inherent security benefits such as resistance to common network attacks.

Disadvantages are also listed, including limited practice cases, lack of native frameworks, and deployment complexity, which must be addressed by the ecosystem.

Step 2 – Project Solution Selection

Choosing a cloud provider is the first decision. The author prefers Tencent Cloud (SCF) and builds the rest of the guidance on that platform, though the principles apply to other providers.

For function type, the recommendation is to use “event functions” combined with “code deployment” rather than “WEB functions” or “image deployment”. Code deployment keeps the cloud and local environments consistent, simplifies debugging, and offers fast, reliable updates.

Step 3 – Framework Selection

The article argues that for small Serverless projects, traditional frameworks add little value and may even hinder performance, concurrency, and learning speed. Instead, a lightweight or custom framework that supports unit testing and mirrors cloud execution is preferred. The author describes a self‑built PHP‑based framework that organizes code into xxxapi.php , ctrl , model , and a vendor/simplescf core library.

Step 4 – Project Division and Scheduling

Tasks should be divided by API rather than by traditional functional modules. Each API gets a responsible person, an effort estimate, and its own unit tests. Common utilities are extracted into shared modules, and a test‑driven development workflow is encouraged.

Step 5 – Project Deployment

Three deployment approaches are compared: management console, Serverless Framework CLI, and SDK. The console is cumbersome, the CLI requires careful YAML configuration, and the SDK is heavyweight for most developers. The author’s solution is a custom GUI tool that enables one‑click updates for hundreds of functions, dramatically reducing deployment time.

Overall, the article presents a step‑by‑step methodology for adopting Serverless in small‑to‑medium projects, emphasizing cost efficiency, rapid iteration, and a micro‑service‑style deployment where each API is a separate cloud function.