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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

So yeah basically serverless is just too expensive. It's cheap or free for low volume, to get you hooked, but for any "serious" service it is too expensive.

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Developer time is the highest cost. Building and deploying a function in an hour minimizes time to market and opportunity cost. Lifting and shifting to a dedicated service like AppEngine is a "good problem to have" once the function's usage exceeded specific thresholds. However, if you never reach said thresholds (e.g. only a few thousand calls a day), you didn't spend the time/money setting up a service backed by dedicated services.

Spinning up an app engine service is incredibly easy and, if using standard environment, is basically free until you have load. It auto scales from zero very quickly (milliseconds).

wow, this is great insight on the economics. Thanks!

That just isn't true. For many companies the cost of their IT infrastructure is a very small fraction of their annual turnover. It all depends on the economics of your particular case whether or not this makes sense. For some companies it does, for some it doesn't.

At some point the fixed cost of real servers does become appealing.

That point comes way further along, assuming you're talking about bare metal and not simply cloud instances.

For my workloads, serverless functions would end up costing 4-5x more than operating the infrastructure myself. Given that my infrastructure costs exceed the salary of some number of developers, that's a very real difference.

Probably makes a lot of sense for early-stage, though.

It is literally tech debt, in the credit card sense. You get to validate the market faster, but if it takes off then you incur a higher interest rate (it gets expensive quickly after a point)

If you're really iterating quickly, much of the code may have a short shelf life, so you can also see it as leveraging tech debt, since a fail amount of the code may not be needed in 3mo.

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