[okaramian]

I think it's very dependent on the task. I do agree with you, building a large/high load system on lambda is bad for the reasons you're suggesting. I think a lot of the hoop jumping is due to experimentation (you won't know how much of a pain in the ass a piece of technology is until you need to deal with it).

We've mostly used it for small tasks that will get run once a day. It's been fantastic for that, as putting up a box to handle a sparsely (one or a couple of times a day) run task is a lot of work and is expensive.