At our startup building interactive TV apps, serverless was compelling: we needed to scale to thousands of users within one minute of a live show announcement, and we had exactly one hour to make everything work. Formula One pit stop mentality. But when the bank tells you “we are making our service better with new technology,” what do you actually feel? Less personal service, paying anyway, and living through the hiccups.
Is serverless faster? You can get up and running faster as a developer, sure. But cold start latency is real. We spent years in web operations saying every millisecond counts, and now every Nth user gets a container spin-up delay. We had to pre-warm containers, generating fake load to anticipate real load – so what did we actually gain? API Gateway plus Lambda in a VPC plus an Internet gateway for authentication adds latency on top of latency. The majority of the audience agreed: serverless is not faster from the end-user perspective.
Is it more reliable? Microservices and single-function focus can improve code reliability. But during a live show, if something fails and we own no servers, we are blind. Lambda containers share /tmp, memory, and networking – we hit disk-full errors at peak because temporary files persisted across executions within the same container. Is it more secure? API Gateway sits outside your VPC. Credentials ship with deploys. No IP-based filtering. No per-function rate limiting – we hit our 30,000 execution limit. Is it cheaper? Per-request billing sounds great until the business asks “what will this cost?” and you cannot answer because usage is unpredictable.
The first ServerlessConf keynote speaker had a baseball bat saying “go away with servers, end of DevOps.” He was wrong. You still have to collaborate – maybe not internally, but with every external service you depend on. I became friends with most of my service providers. They love getting detailed feedback, and I get roadmap visibility and monitoring access in return. The collaboration just extends outward.
Watch on YouTube – available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.