[bwc150]

Really don't understand why anyone puts a side project on a pay-per-use provider when 99% of the projects would be perfectly fine on a $5/mo max vps. Although I also use a prepaid cell phone provider, so maybe I just hate the idea of blank checks.

[nostrebored]

You get 1 million free lambda invocations per month, completely free of infrastructure headaches for simple projects.

You can also make a CloudWatch alarm on billing to throttle your lambda functions at your specified price point. It's only a blank check if you want it to be.

[geezerjay]

> It's only a blank check if you want it to be.

Doesn't AWS force customers of their free tier to provide a valid paying method (i.e., credit card) to be charged once any limit is surpassed?

[TYPE_FASTER]

You can throttle serverless services by invocation count. AWS will alert you when an account exceeds a budget, Azure used to let you put a hard limit on the spend, not sure if they still do.

[seanwilson]

> Really don't understand why anyone puts a side project on a pay-per-use provider

Serverless isn't always pay per use. Firebase, Netlify and Heroku all have limited free tiers where there's no limit you get to where you get charged.

Compared to a VPS, with the above services I get Git based deploy and don't have to worry about server maintenance beyond specifying e.g. which version of Node or Python I want to use.

Seeing people SSHing into servers to install packages and using Git pull to deploy makes me cringe now. I'd rather get on with coding.

[staticassertion]

My side project is on lambda. The #1 cost for me is the EC2 service I use for a DB they integrate with, because my lambdas basically don't execute except a few times on the weekend.

Nice to not have to worry about patching or updates or any other ops work at all.

[alien_]

It's not so much about the money as it is about the convenience of not having to maintain that VPS with security patches and so on and automatically getting it scale without any effort if needed. You can just focus on the actual code.

It's also more convenient if you are shipping your software to your users instead of running in SaaS mode, like I do with my https://autospotting.org project. I wouldn't want to ask my users to pay, run and maintain an EC2 instance for it.

Those who appreciate me doing this would hopefully donate those $5 to me on Patreon :-)

[throwaway98121]

These are good reasons, but how many projects really have such a need to scale, for example?

If you have let’s say a massive developer organization, some level of abstraction so you don’t have to manage provisioning servers/hosts and invest time in undifferentiated (no or low value add) activities is great.

The cost of these function as a service solutions is very high though, even in those scenarios, at least from my own experience.

A lot of people rush to these solutions and CTOs blindly sign off without realizing it’s just added tech debt.

[alien_]

The initial question was about side projects, that may or may not need to scale but often run at pennies monthly.

Hopefully someday the side project launches and makes it to the first page of HackerNews or ProductHunt and then you need to cope with insane amounts of (mostly junk) traffic, which can be hard if you just happen to have a $5 VPS, so you're likely to fail your launch.

At sustained scale serverless solutions can be very expensive indeed, but that's a great problem to have for a side project.

Large organizations or established projects would likely be an order of magnitude cheaper to run their compute on EC2, maybe with RIs or spot or a combination of these (or their equivalents on other cloud/VPC providers), or even on bare metal if the usage patterns are sufficiently flat.

[DeonPenny]

One you can apply limits, two you have free tiers and you don't have a credit card, three yeh $5 sounds cheap but some people still can't afford that, four it's less maintenance. Those at least have been my reasoning

[geezerjay]

> three yeh $5 sounds cheap but some people still can't afford that

I don't buy that excuse, as AWS requires a valid CC to gain access to their free tier, and no hypothetical user who can't afford €5/month will have CCs to pass off at will.

[DeonPenny]

I'm not sure about AWS but firebase and google cloud functions don't. My younger sister actually uses it for her backend. She's a college student and $5 a month if affordable but she doesn't want to pay it. I'd would also say I would in college maybe have 100-200 dollars to work with. Yeh I could pay it but I wouldn't want to.

[toyg]

No admin and no deployment headaches. Keeping a box ticking, in a secure manner, is not trivial.