[datadeft]

Sure they can.

I was just watching the video DHH put online about this new project and it was quite good seeing copy pasting IP addresses to YAML files still excites some people or think that this is somehow on par with a serverless offering to any cloud company.

[tstrimple]

It feels like so many people who complain about the cloud expense and complexity are only ever using VM based solutions and ignore all of the capabilities you get out of the box using managed or "serverless" services. When you treat the cloud like just another data center but someone else manages it for you you're likely not going to have an optimal cloud based solution and of course it's going to be more expensive.

If you're building a simple app, using Functions as a Service along with serverless document based storage solutions will enable you to have a very cost effective cloud deployment which includes so many things out of the box like the ability to scale globally without having to change your application architecture. For my small hobby projects, this amounts to a few dollars a month per application as the only cost which isn't purely consumption based is disk space for the database. I built an application for a small company (around 10k MAU) which costs them around $40 / month using these tools. Yeah, they could be on a small VPS somewhere with the same performance characteristics for the current user load. But then I would have had to build in all of the things I get from managed solutions myself. I haven't had to think about patching my server OS in years.

[datadeft]

Yeah this is exactly how I see it. Thinking in terms of VMs is not going make you understand serverless.

[krab]

Well, if you do it once every two months and you save two engineers' salaries, I'll be the first one to do it. And I hate YAML and repetitive work.