Are Serverless Services Worth It?

I recently wrote about how <a href="https://betterprogramming.pub/the-solution-architects-guide-to-serverless-27af39ad57b" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">serverless services can be used anywhere</a>. I tried to change the messaging around these services to help people understand they aren’t exclusively for serverless applications. You can use serverless services for any part of your app that runs on-prem, in a Kubernetes cluster, or anything in between. After I published it and started receiving feedback on it, I realized I might have put out a dangerous message. Yes, serverless services are great — they are inexpensive to run, elastically scale from 0 to hundreds of thousands of requests per second, and require little-to-no configuration to run. But it might not always the right choice. When I was running one of the early cloud teams at my last company, I was blissfully unaware of the hole I was digging for myself. I made the decision to invest my engineering team’s time to learn how to build serverless architectures, design NoSQL data models, structure multi-tenant systems, heck, even learn JavaScript. All of which are sought-after, highly marketable skills. In my head, I was doing the company a favor. However, as our production deadline approached and we began running through operational readiness reviews, it became clear I hadn’t made the best decision. The engineering team was the only set of people who knew how to support the app. Our front-line support team, technical support, implementation staff, data conversion specialists, and maintenance teams had no idea how the app worked. They were used to on-prem, single tenant, .NET, apps with a SQL database. Not all this fancy new cloud tech. <a href="https://betterprogramming.pub/are-serverless-services-worth-it-249dbbaff3b9">Click Here</a>