[azurelogic]

As someone who has been working almost daily with Lambda and other AWS serverless services for close to 2 years, it astounds me to see so much FUD and misinformation among one of the smartest technical communities that I know.

Serverless is about making as much computing power as you demand available on demand with a "pay only what you use" price model without demanding that you maintain the underlying systems. In addition, embracing this model tends to allow you to break out of the request driven model of needing to call APIs for everything. Instead, you enable a whole host of new event driven interactions between application components.

Even this article misses one of the more interesting advantages: scalability under varying load. AWS Lambda may cost more than an equivalent EC2 instance if run constantly, but it scales up and down almost instantly without adding cost. You just pay for the compute time. So, burst traffic is no sweat (up to your account limits or function configured limits). If your application has highly irregular load, Lambda can keep it more responsive while saving you money too.

And it is nothing like paying for shared hosting or other single unit, where you still have no horizontal scalability.