[musingsole]

I used Lambdas as our core logic processor for 4 years. We cared about every failure and the core motivation was it's scaling ability as our traffic was bursty and would scale 1000x on random days.

Lambda -- Serverless in general -- is fantastic when your application has any amount of downtime (on the order of 10 seconds). If there is even the briefest moment your system can be turned off, you'll save dramatically over a traditional server model.

[nicesave]

This is actually a decent use case for it. I should have been more nuanced in my response.

I have seen more then one project fail when they use lamdas to serve apis. This is because of the cold start problem, but also because lambda does have scaling issues unless you work around them. By scaling I mean greater then 1000 tps.

All of the services performed within lambdas SLA but failed to meet the requirements that the project had.

The solution was always to wrap whatever function it called in a traditional app and deploy it using a contanerized solution where response times dramatically improved and services became more reliable.

The idea behind lambda is good, but it can't beat more traditional stacks at the moment. One could argue that most projects don't have these requirements, and I would agree, but the marketing behind lambda doesn't make that clear.