Do people still use them for full production systems? We use them a bit for ancillary things but TBH, if you have some k8s or similar, solution, it's maybe not worth it to not use a standard container deployment environment that everyone knows.
- make them testable locally
- planning/qa-ing yaml configs with devops team, because they only grant me readonly access on their precious over engineered helm chart stack, they don’t even offer running my unit tests in their pipeline for me
- painful debugging process because everything that touches a lambda is another aws service config somewhere
I honestly don’t know why anyone wastes their time. We will be deprecating these aws lambdas for traditional api on our next version of our app. Serverless is garbage way to deploy code and is designed to tax you/charge you fees at every turn. It is for people who want to deploy poorly thought out code and rewrite it later, and explain the bill later.
And of course, no easy way to test locally.
I can understand having to stub out external calls to vendors and clients but this is ridiculous. There is no local story.
I took the system from dev to prod and much of it was boring in the very best sense of boring (also helped that I had a good team, although they were new to it as well).
I had one major gripe with it (and everything Azure) afterwards:
On dev there are absolutely no guarantees: components might go down half a workday and they don't care.
And when you go to production the prices goes absolutely through the roof (IIRC $9000/year for the most basic message broker I could configure that wouldn't have the risk of being offline half a day, and every component is like this).
So while it was really cool to work on a cloud native system if someone ever asks me to design one for them, that design will be presented with a price tag for what it will cost to take it to production.
One thing that makes it possible is that "orchestration" is embedding in your code, using a library (https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-py). With lambdas you need step functions which is not exactly easy to test locally.
Also no need for "layers".
But the main point why serverless is garbage is that the old stack does everything better.
Yes, SST [1] uses lambdas heavily but makes it more seamless and less visible, just the place your code runs.
I’ve also found Azure Container Apps to hit the right balance. It’s kubernetes under the hood, which you don’t have to mess with at all, except that it can use KEDA [2] scaling rules to scale your containers to zero, then scale up with any of the supported KEDA scalers like when a message hits a queue.
[1] https://sst.dev/
[2] https://keda.sh/