When serverless is worth the effort

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Serverless is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is worth it

Excellent for spiky, event-shaped workloads. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How to decide

Cost modelling matters more here than anywhere else. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What this looks like day to day

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Three things worth confirming about serverless before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Cold starts and vendor coupling are the real trade-offs — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.