Serverless for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about serverless assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What to keep

Excellent for spiky, event-shaped workloads. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

How to approach it

Cost modelling matters more here than anywhere else. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

What this looks like day to day

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.