[FatalBaboon]

He ends up being so tightly tied to Amazon it's scary to me.

"You can scale all you want, servers are not your problem anymore!"

proceeds to build a million dollar business

"That'll be <way too many $$> and you got nowhere to run, now that all those clients of yours depend on our service"

proceeds to pay insane amounts of $$ while rewriting in serverful

Is there any standard in the serverless world as to what they accept and how they work?

[bdcravens]

> Is there any standard in the serverless world

Numerous companies depend on s3. Along the way open-source solutions have been built, as well as competitive solution that are API-compatible.

We're seeing the same in serverless. Frameworks that are moving toward multi-cloud, competitive solutions, etc. While not totally portable, you can take much of your code with you. You'd do the same if you had a standard Rails app running on an easy-deploy solution like Heroku and had to move to Digital Ocean. In other words, the potential for vendor lock-in is a problem that we've been created patterns to solve for many years.

>> That'll be <way too many $$> and you got nowhere to run

That makes for a great conspiracy theory but AWS has never done anything remotely like that. Through the history of the service they continue to bring down the price on their various offerings. Not sure what makes Lambda the piece they'd abandon all that for (insert evil laugh) world domination.

[amazingman]

>That makes for a great conspiracy theory but AWS has never done anything remotely like that.

Just last year they changed the support model to be a percentage of your AWS spend, as opposed to the previous flat rate. They even had the audacity to dress it up as a straight-up price drop.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/07/aws-suppo...

Imagine you're an organization spending 100k/mo on AWS and your monthly support line item goes from $50 to $3000. Oh and by the way, the free support tier cannot create technical support requests.

[jessaustin]

Did any firm that spends $100k/month not realize that they were underpaying for support at $50?

[RhodesianHunter]

If I'm spending six figures on your product I expect at least a certain amount of support to be free.

[kk_cz]

You expect wrong. Standard support fees are usually in ranges of 10-20% of the price that you are paying for the product. And it makes sense - costs of providing support are not constant why should their price be?

[bdcravens]

True - I was limiting my thinking to their product offerings.

[FatalBaboon]

Oh I did not mean AWS would suddently rise their pricing, just that servers may scale, but so does the cost of the service, and inflexion points may bite you.

Then, of course: "You're using the service wrong, silly, all you have to do is sign up for a few years to a bunch of our services".

proceeds...

Don't be fooled, AWS and the likes are very expensive, not as much as Heroku, but definitely more than OVH for example.

I am currently migrating a client's (valuable) production from AWS to OVH to divide their infrastructure cost by 3. Thankfully it did not depend on any non-OSS parts (RDS becomes a Postgres etc).

The question becomes: how far can you go with serverless until you have to move out, and then how much money was really saved once you paid the price of un-aws-ing?

The author of the article clearly spent quite a lot of human ressources and money to get his serverless setup running (hosted ES, Kibana, etc gets expensive fast).

In the end, I find it hard to believe that this is a real time saver, let alone a money saver, in fine.

[jjeaff]

I think the point for many is not a net money saved but a reshaping of the cost curve. I am ok spending a lot farther down the road to transfer everything off of AWS if I can spend almost nothing now. Because as a small business or startup, I don't have money now. But if I grow to the point that AWS becomes too expensive I can assume that I will have more money at that time so the cost of switching will hopefully not be too painful.

[hdhzy]

I think that's a proverbial "nice problem to have". If you're big and generating revenue you can think about optimizing costs but when you're small and just starting getting your solution if front of potential customers fast is better than thinking about problems you don't have right now (like perfect infrastructure for billion dollar company).