[djsweet]

I only have experience with GCP’s Cloud Functions, but in that environment, “serverless” is only cheaper than virtual servers if your load can’t saturate the lowest end VM GCP has to offer.

Once you have enough load to justify going “unserverless” the prices drop to approximately 1/4 that of Cloud Functions for the same burst performance, and that’s before playing billing games like long-term commitments or using preemptible instances.

What’s truly scalable about “serverless compute” versus VMs is the line item on your bill. Sure, “they manage the auto-scaling” but for the per-unit price you rapidly hit a point where you might as well set up a Kubernetes load balancer and eat the setup costs. The pricing model only works out in your favor if you _don’t_ have load.

It would not surprise me to learn that the same is true of AWS prices.