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Comment by pcr910303 | Hacker News Reader

There was a hype on serverless, so a lot of people here on HN is a bit allergic on them and tell ‘an EC2 instance is all you need’. And it’s not wrong — I’ve seen seriously over-engineered serverless systems with so much AWS-specific code. But a few years passed now a lot more services now provide (almost) lockin-free APIs that are pretty useful for simple.

IMO blindly recommending ‘just self host’, a sentiment that I see a lot in HN isn’t a good answer.

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Blindly, nothing is a good answer; you need to weigh your needs. But so most people blindly grab aws; unlike yourself, I find HN actually almost The AWS & K8s Promotion Team. People swear by this stuff here, even if you don’t need it, at all. They forget that not all startups have million$/year to throw away on devops to handle the bizarre complexity of those solutions while they also just really do not need them (now and, statistically, as they will likely fail, ever). It all always reads like resume driven development; I understand it; good people you hire want to do stuff that furthers their career. But it makes it blind in almost all cases I read here (which are tiny companies with no traffic at all, ramping up to be the size of TikTok overnight).

But I digress.

Ec2 is incredibly expensive (outside the free tier that is) compared to many other vps options.

And as for serverless; last month a startup without funding was making a scraper and used aws lambda because it was easy. With their js code it took me 1 day to save them 1/1000th of their cost by using a vps; on ec2 that would’ve been a 1/10th save (outside the free tier which would not work; not enough power). This saving allows them to hire an extra dev for free to work on, you know, extra bottom line features to actually create a business.

For a $10m-for-a-PoC seed invested startup, this is all the usual blah blah about ‘but it saves time on management’ (it doesn’t in this case or many others I have seen in the wild), but if you don’t have prior VC relations on speed dial, you might be funding it all yourself (for now) and cloud stuff is just shovelling money into a pit if you don’t need the upsides at this moment.

I find the argument that you shouldn’t be using serverless because you don’t have money to throw on devops a bit… strange? Isn’t the big reason on using serverless to avoid spending money and time to managing your own server?

And IMO the lambdas-are-cheap argument is more like that lambdas are expensive, but they multiply to your scale, so it’s super-cheap in small startups. I view lambdas as a starting point for PoCs — they eventually have to move to VPCs, but lambdas are free if it gets no traffic.

And that’s why I’ve mentioned lockin-free APIs: lambdas are terrible if you can’t migrate away from it. But if you can without much effort, it provides pretty good value.

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