Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs
The headline is a bit of a misnomer. This happens in large businesses all the time (which isn't to say it's "good", hardly is, but it suggests the causation is incorrect here, which then indicates the conclusion is entirely off-base):<p>1) We have sexy new product! Everyone use it so we have some use-case stories to tell and we look credible! Who cares if it's not the right tool for the job! We need a splashy way to use hackneyed business speak like "we're eating our own dog food" at the next user con so all the IT middle managers there will fight over early access and adoption. PROFIT! (Screams of technology teams in the background of "a knife is the most expensive, useless pry tool you can buy, but whatever, you are not listening, mmmkay").<p>2) A few quarters/years later (if you're lucky and you made it or someone with enough gravity in their title finally saw the light): Why is expense so high in this business unit? This is insane! Let's go back to a more sane architecture. (Screams of technology teams going back to what was working in the first place, but was not sexy nor necessarily new now that no one is watching and hype cycle is over)<p>Does this mean that serverless is useless? Dumb? Uneconomical? No way. For bursty, very short running workloads, it can be GREAT and INCREDIBLY economical.<p>What is useless and "dumb" is whomever thought that Prime Video's encoding workloads were going to do anything but increase cost and were somehow a fit for a system whose business case specifically necessitates bursty, shorter workloads that are primarily scale-to-zero for significant periods of the day/week/month.<p>It was a marketing stunt gone horribly wrong: intentional or not, but that doesn't repudiate the value of "serverless" for the right workloads, it just proves you better really understand the technology and the business case and the scale economics, and that goes for <i>any</i> technology.