[lmm]

Can't you use a queue service that's essentially just managed kafka/activemq/other-standard-system? I mean sure if you wanted to move off the cloud vendor you'd have to run your queues yourself, but if you're programming to the API of well-known open-source queue system then you're never going to be very locked into a particular vendor.

[jshen]

The short answer is yes, you can do that, but it starts to get nuanced rather quickly. The context of this is a desire to go “serverless” and that solutions like this only give you serverless for the relatively easy parts of your stack. If your goal is to go “serverless” I take that to mean a few things listed below.

    1) you don’t have to manage infrastructure
    2) you don’t have to think about infrastructure (what size cluster do i need to buy?)
    3) you pay for what you use at a granular level. (GB stored, queries made, function invocations, etc)
    4) scale to zero (when not in use, you don’t pay for much of anything)

Most things don’t hit all of these points, but typical managed services hit very few of these points. Sure, I can use a managed MySQL, but it only satisfies 1 of the 4 points.