[Bartweiss]

I think you're right about this.

Optimistically, it could represent a positive trade-off that replaces perpetual upkeep with upfront effort, and all-hours patching and on-call with 9-5 coding.

In practice, I think a lot of those fixed costs get paid too often to ever come out ahead, especially since ops effort is often per-server or per-cluster. The added dev effort is probably a fixed or scaling cost per feature, and if code changes fast enough then a slower development workflow is a far bigger cost than trickier upkeep.

Moving off-hours work into predictable, on-hours work is an improvement even at equal times, but I'm not sure how much it actually happens. Outages still happen, and I'm not sure serverless saves much less out-of-hours ops time compared to something like Kubernetes.