[pharaohgeek]

I always hear people talk about "it's scalable" in terms of scaling UP. To me, the value is in scaling DOWN. If you have a function that doesn't run continuously, there's value in executing it as a Lambda instead of keeping a server or Docker container up 24/7 to do the work. Same with other serverless technologies. If there is a period of time where there is complete inactivity, being able to scale to 0 is a cost benefit.

[foofie]

> To me, the value is in scaling DOWN.

So much this. To me, something like AWS Lambdas is the best tool in the toolbox if you already run stuff in AWS and you want to offload any event handler or background task to a dedicated service. More often than not your use case will fit easily in the lambda's free tier, and you don't have to waste any time monitoring a service that rarely runs.