[SahAssar]

Serverless has two things that I really like about it:

1. Scale to zero, which allows me to do things like automatically deploy a full environment for each branch in a project, with a full infra, frontend, backend, database, etc.

2. Good integration with IaC tools, so that I can define my infra and my runners in a single language/tool, be it terraform/cdk or something else. Most "monolithic" setups split configuring the infra and what runs in it into two tools/steps (please let me know of ones that don't!).

But if I actually run a application for a long time with somewhat consistent load there are always cheaper, more performant and flexible solutions than a serverless setup.

[mlhpdx]

That’s a depends situation. If you’re using direct service integration instead of Lambda, it can be cheaper. And, if you use VMs only as the front-end to push batches of requests to serverless compute you get the best of both worlds and the cheapest by a long shot. Not everything can fit in that model, but the things that do are magically inexpensive.

I’m actually working on a product to make that architecture more approachable (and cheaper yet). I’d be happy to hear from folks running network services on VMs and wishing there was a better way.

[SahAssar]

Do you mean that you can get actual scale-to-zero using that approach? I think the cost of the VM would not scale down like that, right?

[mlhpdx]

That’s true, the front-facing VMs always need to be there (hence the product I’m working on — so at least you don’t need to run them). The real work is done in serverless, in batches. Basically I think the world needs something like API Gateway for UDP and custom TCP, but that targets serverless backends rather than VMs.

[SaltyBackendGuy]

We've found it really nice for worker queues for specific workloads that fire infrequently'ish.