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Seems like most companies have one of these, including Google (Firebase Hosting + Functions). It seems like a common platform, however I always have trouble imagining what is the use case, especially in scalability (Function/Lambda is fine for small projects, but feels like it's not widely scalable and still has a lot or limitations)

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The best way to think about lambda at scale is as "glue layer" that is a way to call your backend (e.g. on GCP/AWS). But as you're getting started, you can just do all the functionality on serverless, w/o dealing with deploys, etc.

What would be the benefits vs hitting your API directly? (Having a "normal" API server)

It has some value add features, like authentication that you don't have to handle. It's also an autoscaling API layer if all it needs to do is query several of your backend services. It's probably less useful if you have a monolithic app so all the requests are just passed through, unless you use a lot of the value adds.

I'm not a Lambda expert though, there might be things I missed.

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