I think this is a bit too harsh. Sure, it has a few rough edges, and not everyone's idea of prime time is the same, but Lambda is perfectly suited for lots of use cases that do not depend on very low latency -- for example, file conversions, async tasks where users can wait a few seconds such as payment processing, automating incoming e-mail workflows etc.

We've been running APIs on it for six months with no issues, and are now in the process of moving the entire backend from heroku to Lambda. So far, no major issues.

Regarding Lambda being a building block, I actually like that. Werner Vogels points out [1] that one of the key lessons from 10 years of AWS is that the market wants primitives, and that the higher-level toolkits emerge from that. A ton of third-party helpful stuff is already out, such as apex, serverless and so on. We built a toolkit[2] that lets people use Lambda and API Gateway from JavaScript very similar to lightweight web frameworks (eg api.get('/hello', function (request) {...})

Documentation is there, just not in the most sensible places, and the whole pipeline is optimised for Java processing (eg Velocity VTL for API Gateway transformations allows people to do everything they need, as long they know the Java collections API executed below).

[1] http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2016/03/10-lessons-from-...

[2] https://github.com/claudiajs/claudia/