Signs it is time to revisit serverless

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A few signals that serverless is due some attention.

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Excellent for spiky, event-shaped workloads
• Cold starts and vendor coupling are the real trade-offs

Where to start

Cost modelling matters more here than anywhere else. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

In practice

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.