Learning Serverless

Chapter 12. Conclusion

Everything has an end, except sausage, which has two.

Dada Land, September 2019

Our journey together is coming to an end. To close out the book, let’s look at a framework for making decisions about vendors and technologies in general. Then I will walk you through how you might apply certain key concepts from this book differently based on which hosted or self-hosted options you use.

Remember that, as with all marketing speak, the promises of serverless don’t apply universally. Be on the lookout for such language as a sign that people are hyping a technology about which they only have a shallow understanding. Instead, try to translate it into what it really means. For example, “you only pay for what you use” is really “you don’t have to pay for idle capacity.” But of course that cost does get factored into the pricing offered by your cloud provider: even marketing speak has to obey the laws of physics. Idle capacity has to be powered, provisioned, and accounted for in a multitude of ways. So it really comes down to throwing money at the problem.

Managing a data center is complicated, no matter how much experience your organization may have with it. Doing so may not provide any additional lift or value to the internal or end users of your system, so if there is a reliable way to abstract the problem away, that may be in your best interest. The same goes for servers. Sure, it’s best to pick purpose-fit solutions when possible. So serverless may not be the ...