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by Olreich 524 days ago
This article misses the most important reason to not use Serverless: Cost. It's way more expensive to run serverless than it is to run any other format, even something like AWS Fargate is better than Lambda if you keep your Lambda running for 5% of the time.

The second one is even more important though: Time. How many of my systems are guaranteed to stop after 15 minutes or less? Web Servers wouldn't like that, anything stateful doesn't like that. Even compute-heavy tasks where you might like elastic scaling fall down if they take longer than 15 minutes sometimes, and then you've paid for those 15 minutes at a steep premium and have to restart the task.

Serverless only makes sense if I can do it for minor markup compared to owning a server and if I can set time limits that make sense. Neither of these are true in the current landscape.

1 comments

This is why I use serverless (API Gateway + Lambda) for super low traffic stuff. If I have a cron that runs 24 times a day for 12 seconds, or a service that occasionally gets a request every few days, it makes sense not to deal with the overheard and waste of a server or container running constantly.