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Comment by slobodan_ | Hacker News Reader

I am not worried about A at all. This was a technical article, but here's the explanation I posted to twitter:

Although I enjoy talking about technology, and I enjoy working with serverless, it's important to note that using serverless for @slackvacation is not a technology decision. It's a business decision. Not because the auto -scaling, that's nice to have, but that's not a problem startups are facing in their early phase. It's about financial incentives — also, about focus, ability to move fast and test ideas, and the ability to grow without shooting future self into the foot.

We still often fail to do things fast enough, but we are aware of the problem and working hard to fix it.

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It sounds like part of your decision was that Lambda comes out cheaper for hosting. That also doesn't pass the arithmetic I use to evaluate such things.

A dev, fully loaded, will cost you $200/hour. A half cage at a colo with a really fast machine in it will cost $800/month. So if you choose a stack that adds 4 hours of work each month (or 80 extra hours upfront), you're behind.

Given that (as I touched on above), your chances of outgrowing a beefy box in a colo (or its managed equivalent) can be thought of as zero until you see the big success event that proves otherwise, my money is still on boring tech and boring hosting.

Granted, Lambda is cool. I love building stuff on it for other people on their dime. But as a guy who also builds businesses on my dime, it remains a tool for tiny niche cases that can safely go down on a saturday morning without making me cancel my weekend.

Serverless is so much more than just Lambda functions.

I recently heard the following analogy:

IaaS => Owning a home

PaaS => Bed and breakfast

Serverless => Hotel room

Lambda I guess would be like using the coffee pot in a hotel room? Don't worry about power, don't worry about beans. Every time you come into your room it's ready to go, just press "on".

the point of serverless is that everything is much simpler, it is just functions! it is more a question of how early do you break even on ROI in simplicity, and maybe that isn’t in the first 6 months of a startup’s life yet. But in the future the break even point may be zero minutes.

Its just moving complexity from one place to another though, isn't it? From the application layer to the deployment layer.

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