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Comment by rmbyrro | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't have a universal answer.

Lambda doesn't charge for idle time or capacity, for example. Depending on your usage patterns and availability requirements, you may have a high cost in idle waste when using servers.

But I think where Lambda really shines is removing time from infra setup, maintenance, etc. These are hidden costs and, even when accounted for, frequently underestimated.

If you need even a part time DevOps or SRE engineer to make sure you'll keep things running smooth or will recover fast from a disaster, their salary alone already pays for shitloads of Lambda invocation and compute time.

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Don’t you need an SRE or Devops focused person regardless?

You still need a way to test and deploy the code your pushing. You also need to set up logging and networking that ties it into the rest of your systems

I use lambdas for nearly everything at a games startup. The "Serverless framework" - https://www.serverless.com - has built-in concepts of dev/stage/prod and routing from URLs -> function etc. Logging goes to cloudfront but you could use any logging library you wanted inside your functions.

We don't have an operations team, so each dev deploys their own services; this framework gives them all a consistent interface so we know how to test or deploy someone else's code.

Advantages from my POV:

   * zero or simplified ops; no load balancer setup etc. 
   * we don't pay for idle hardware
   * scales well by default (built with parallelism in mind)

If a certain game spikes in popularity then it COULD become expensive - but IMO that's better default behavior than a server falling over.

Xsmasher,

Would you be interested in sharing your Serverless Story with our Serverless community? We are looking for guest blog contributors, community call showcases and case-studies.

Please fill out the form in the link below and I will follow up with you! https://formfacade.com/public/112252076977537904120/all/form...

Cheers!

I think it's awesome that it works for you. I've built out all types of infrastructure setups and was simply pointing out that whether you need an Ops/SRE person is a cost that doesn't seem to be based off of whether or not you go serverless.

You mention that serverless.com offers a sort of PaaS that simplifies your life. That's similar to Heroku, which does the same thing but with regular servers and similarly allows you to defer having a dedicated Ops person. Having worked at plenty of places that leveraged PaaS's for most of their needs, I'd say it's normal to not have an Ops team until you begin hitting issues around general maintenance and secure networking setups.

It's kind of a nice to have but no you don't ""need "" that type of person to get started at least.

I was the fourth engineer at a smallish currebtly Series A startup that used lambdas for ~90% of their services and we ( the software devs) built the CICD, API gateway integrations, all of that stuff. We figured out a good solution early and then maintained it. Which made moving forward pretty trivial.

It only got a little bit more complicated as we wanted to use different authorization methods or VPC private link when we did eventually spin up a couple ECS clusters.

The company now has a full-time DevOps/SRE, but they don't really work on the code deploy CI stuff. They more deal with I am audits and security and stuff...

I definitely didn't mean to imply that you needed an SRE/Devops for starting off. The OP just came across as sounding like you don't need SRE/Devops in general if you use Serverless, which from my experience at multiple orgs just seems idealist.

I'd argue that the need for someone focused on SRE/Devops comes from factors that are mostly unrelated to whether or not you go serverless.

> already pays for

huge understatement even as written :)

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