<story><title>The Unfulfilled Promise of Serverless</title><url>https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-unfulfilled-promise-of-serverless/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gerbilly</author><text>I have a theory that even though the serverless trend is sold as a technical revolution, it&amp;#x27;s mostly due to accounting practices.&lt;p&gt;Serverless is purely about CAPEX, vs OPEX.&lt;p&gt;Companies are so loath to make capital expenditures (CAPEX) that they will willingly let their employees waste thousands of extra hours learning  a new development model so they can pay Amazon using operating expenses instead.&lt;p&gt;And it&amp;#x27;s funny because even though amazon has no choice but to use capital expenditures to
populate their datacentres with machines, they are offering lambda as a way to monetize the unused cycles.&lt;p&gt;So lambdas are being twice used as a kind of compromise to fill in the gaps on an accounting sheet.&lt;p&gt;I believe the joke is on us as technical people. We twist ourselves into knots to promote this new development model as a &lt;i&gt;technical&lt;/i&gt; innovation, which it really isn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;We have just made the time-sharing service (they used to have them in the 60s and 70s) fashionable again. (Along with the long feedback cycle which makes working on these systems so frustrating.)</text></comment>
<story><title>The Unfulfilled Promise of Serverless</title><url>https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-unfulfilled-promise-of-serverless/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I couldn&amp;#x27;t disagree with this article more. We&amp;#x27;ve built an entire architecture running our Series A startup on serverless technologies, and it&amp;#x27;s been fantastically successful. We have a small team, so I specifically &lt;i&gt;knew&lt;/i&gt; I didn&amp;#x27;t have the team capacity to do a lot of server management. Here are our general components:&lt;p&gt;1. We have a bunch of services running on App Engine NodeJS Flexible version. We have extremely minimal lock-in because we basically just have a normal Express app serving GraphQL.&lt;p&gt;2. In fact, we migrated some of our services to Cloud Run for lower costs. Cloud Run is basically serverless Docker containers, and the migration was very easy. Again, our apps are for the most part platform agnostic apps on Node.&lt;p&gt;3. We also make use of Google Cloud Functions for our asynchronous event handling. This has also been a great choice.&lt;p&gt;Going with serverless tech has &lt;i&gt;easily&lt;/i&gt; saved us ~2 FTEs in a team of fewer than 10 engineers.</text></comment>