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Discussion on: How feasible is Serverless technology for startups?

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Alex Rudenko

For just-comments.com/ I only use the serverless tech by AWS, and I must admit that it's not perfect.

First thing I noticed is that there is an overhead for every operation because many systems are involved (CloudFront -> API Gateway -> (VPC) -> Lambda -> DynamoDB). So the cold-start case is almost not suitable for a consumer-facing API. Therefore, I had to implement a CloudWatch event which warms up my important functions.
The second thing (at least with NodeJS) is that it is quite hard to predict if you code will work after deployment. So you will most likely keep a separate test environment in the cloud to be able to test properly. To summarize: there is a different set of problems you will be solving if you use FaaS. Sometimes it feels like something that was easy to accomplish with normal servers is now a hard task.

Nevertheless, I chose to use serverless because it matches the pricing model for my project, which is also based on the amount invocations that the users perform. Also, I believe the availability, stability, and scalability of the system is much higher than if I would do it myself. To provide the same level, I would probably need more development effort and constant monitoring.