The biggest advantage of serverless development is that you don't need to concern yourself with the undifferentiated heavy lifting of self hosting and managing hardware, VM's, application updates, OS updates , networking, load balancing, etc and all the work that comes from that and focus on solving business problems immediately. Running it yourself will not necessarily add any additional benefit and you will will have wasted time and effort getting this entire set of complex infrastructure setup before you have developed any application code to actually solve business problems. Serverless is more than just Lambda, API Gateway and DynamoDB. There are all the other services you would need to spin up replacements for and manage over time; SQS, SNS, Kinesis, S3, etc including the inevitable delays yet again to get them setup for use by developers that just want to solve the business problem at hand.