I appreciate that many people have reservations about hyper-focusing on product development and utilising the serverless ecosystem. I understand that it may appear working with coarser primitives is constraining and unproductive, and for unfamiliar practitioners, like anything else, there's a learning curve. Having been involved in three startups that adopted the AWS serverless mantra, I've come to argue in its favour.

Serverless architectures require designs that accommodate these constraints upfront, and there's a learning curve to finding the best primitives to adopt. It's akin to building with Lego rather than a 3D printer—you're working within predefined limits. Once you understand the optimal patterns for utilising these constraints, they become guardrails that reduce development and operational costs over time.

In my experience, the bar for requiring "always on" is higher than we might realise. Also, the choice between serverless and traditional elastic computing models isn't always binary. Excellent options like AWS Fargate serve as a practical middle ground.

Of course, this approach is only sometimes applicable. There might be a tipping point where it might make sense to consider renting servers with more traditional hosting solutions. Is optimising operational costs by investing capital in rented or physical infrastructure a strategic decision post-startup?