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Comment by lsaferite | Hacker News Reader

There's obviously a static load level where it makes more sense to have an always-on server vs. a FaaS and you need to monitor that boundary point.

The point of doing something like this "Lambda Monolith" is that transitioning to an always-on server is trivial. I've been doing this exact setup for a while and our static costs basically evaporated. Seeing your costs drop below a dollar/month on a project you are building is amazing. As soon as one of our projects is large enough, we move it to a dedicated instance or cluster. This allows us to delay that point until we have enough revenue to justify the costs.

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I just can't get my head around this argument of 'scales to zero'.

If you have one or more professional developers working on a project how can you be bothered about an extra $20-$200/month when you know you'll also be spending a couple of engineering hours (worth more than $200) on migrating later?

I feel exactly the same way - this idea of a lambda monolith seems applicable to hobby projects only.

Scales to zero means you can span as many environments as you want and don’t bother. Every dev can have multiple environments to demo features and do experiments.

Isn’t that what local machines are for?

If you’re in territory where running locally isn’t feasible you’ve either done something horribly wrong or have scaled way past the point where either a single lambda or single ec2 instance is sufficient.

I don't see how I can use a local machine to demo a feature to my PM.

always-on EC2 instances start at like $20/mo? I don't understand this argument whatsoever.

> Seeing your costs drop below a dollar/month on a project you are building is amazing.

Honestly, this just means you don't have any users

> Honestly, this just means you don't have any users

Which is where many small ideas start.

My buddy had an idea for a few SaaS products and I've helped him develop them. The initial costs were small, but give it was an expense with no income in the near future, finding a way to scale to zero was the only way this became something he'd consider. It's got _very_ sporadic use currently and his bill for each service is literally around $1/month right now. Even the cheapest instance would be more than he's paying.

And that’s totally fine. I have similar stuff setup for hobby projects. But my impression is that this thread is mainly about “real” architecture (for lack of a better word”

I think I might disagree that this isn't "real" architecture.

All system architecture is about designing a system to meet the defined needs. This system is designed to hit the starting needs and has an already designed migration to the medium-term needs. That idea of "YMMV" is very much relevant here as every system has different needs. Some of those needs are minorly different, others are wildly different.

Anyone on this thread that's discounting FaaS usage out of hand with statements like "just run a $20/month server" are demonstrating a lack of imagination. Would I use it as the primary server for a medium+ traffic site, almost certainly not. But there is a whole world of low-traffic services that are well suited to using a FaaS platform over a dedicated server.

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