Five mistakes teams make with serverless

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit serverless.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Excellent for spiky, event-shaped workloads
• Cold starts and vendor coupling are the real trade-offs
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Cost modelling matters more here than anywhere else. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

A reasonable first step

How to tell if yours is fine

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. Three things worth confirming about serverless before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Cost modelling matters more here than anywhere else — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.