No. There's nothing common sense about it. It only seems plausible if you read the sales brochure from a cloud vendor and have no experience with all the weird and whacky failure modes of these systems and the fact that none of the major selling points of serverless actually work as advertised unless you dedicate significant engineering time to make them work - as the GP comment has demonstrated. The amount of engineering time required to make serverless work quickly catches up to or even exceeds just doing the damn thing the normal way.
And that engineering time is not transferable to any other cloud vendor, and neither is your solution now. So congratulations you just locked your business in.
Serverless only makes sense if you have a fairly trivial problem and operate on really narrow margins where you need your infra and associated costs to scale up/down infinitely.
> Serverless only makes sense if you have a fairly trivial problem
That’s exactly the point. The web application needs of most startups are fairly trivial and best supported by a serverless stack. Put it another way: If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago, then it’s serverless today.
If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled.
As a side note, I've learned that the existence of a large number of viable ways to accomplish a task is a pretty big anti-signal for the desirability of accomplishing that task in the first place. When I started my career in 2000, there was a huge debate over whether the "right" way to develop a desktop application was MFC or .NET or Java or Visual Basic or Qt or WxWindows. The real answer was "don't develop desktop apps, because the web's about to take over". When the big web 2.0 businesses were founded from 2005-2011, there were basically two viable options for building a webapp: Rails or Django. Now that everyone's arguing about microservices vs. Docker vs. Kubernetes vs. serverless vs. Beanstalk vs. Heroku, it's likely that the real answer is "develop a blockchain app instead".
> If your best choice was Rails or Django 10 years ago you probably don't have a viable startup today. Why? Because it's 10 years later. Technology moves on and market niches get filled. There are orders of magnitudes more people with the skill to setup a basic CRUD webapp, and about 15 years for the markets that these can serve to have been filled.
That's... not true. The choice of web stack – and, in fact, the whole software – is just a piece of what a startup may need.
Seriously, look at the list of YC startups on 2018 and tell me if most couldn't use either something like Rails, or a Single Page App In React With A Serverless Backend. And it wouldn't matter one bit.
No. There's nothing common sense about it. It only seems plausible if you read the sales brochure from a cloud vendor and have no experience with all the weird and whacky failure modes of these systems and the fact that none of the major selling points of serverless actually work as advertised unless you dedicate significant engineering time to make them work - as the GP comment has demonstrated. The amount of engineering time required to make serverless work quickly catches up to or even exceeds just doing the damn thing the normal way.
And that engineering time is not transferable to any other cloud vendor, and neither is your solution now. So congratulations you just locked your business in.
Serverless only makes sense if you have a fairly trivial problem and operate on really narrow margins where you need your infra and associated costs to scale up/down infinitely.