Ask HN: Skeptical about my company going “full serverless”. What am I missing?
This is from the perspective of a small startup CTO:<p>We&#x27;ve used AWS Lambda for about 4 years, and it&#x27;s been so good and so cheap that I&#x27;m shifting literally everything (except Redis) to serverless. Also, GCP has a better serverless offering (Cloud Run, Spanner), so we&#x27;re switching from AWS to GCP to take advantage of that. I bet we&#x27;re going to see a massive cost reduction, but we&#x27;ll see.<p>Things I like about serverless (again, from the perspective of a very small startup, with 5 engineers, and me being the primary architect):<p>* It&#x27;s so liberating to not worry about EC2 servers and autoscale and container orchestration myself. All our Cloud Formation templates add up to around 3,000 lines, which maybe doesn&#x27;t sound like a lot, but it&#x27;s a lot. There are tons of little configuration things to worry about, and it adds up. (Not to mention the sheer amount of time it took to learn.) ECS Fargate takes care of some of this, but it doesn&#x27;t autoscale based on demand or anything (not without settings things up yourself). (This is a big reason why I want to switch to GCP: Cloud Run is like Fargate in that it runs containers, but unlike Fargate it autoscales from 0 based on load.)<p>* It&#x27;s very cheap in practice, at least for loads like ours that respond to events: API services that sometimes see a lot of use and sometimes see very little use; queue consumers sometimes have a lot to do and sometimes have very little to do. AWS Lambda bills down to the milisecond in terms of resolution, and GCP Cloud Run&#x2F;Cloud Funcitons bills down to the next 100 miliseconds. These are very fine resolutions and for us at least, we&#x27;ve seen costs be small.<p>* For database serverless products (like DynamoDB for example), it&#x27;s very liberating to never have to think &quot;Hm, do we have enough CPU provisioned?&quot;<p>Things I don&#x27;t like about serverless<p>* Pushing source code sucks. Lambda will just one day decide your version of Python or whatever isn&#x27;t good enough and force your customers to upgrade all their user-written code to the latest Python version. (But! Cloud Run supports containers, and so this won&#x27;t be a problem.)