garethmcc

If you use a tool like the Serverless Framework, you can "cobble together the moving parts" and store it into GitHub and make it easily deployable into the cloud. Putting together pieces is what software development is. If you are used to OOP this is even more relevant as the entire idea of OOP is to create discrete pieces of code and compile them together.

PHP for example used to be a "big patchwork" of seperate files working together, but the right tooling came along to think of it as "a unified system". Same thing with Serverless and the Serverless Framework

DynamoDB is a completely different beast and would use no other data store unless I had to. It can pretty much handle any transactional workload I need.

It's cheap, its fast and it scales super high. Don't need much more

If you are using the Serverless Framework to build your serverless application, we actually provide a full CI/CD solution as a part of the Serverless Framework Pro Dashboard that is free to use. You can easily sign up at dashboard.serverless.com and it includes a lot more than just CI/CD; monitoring, debugging, local development via the cloud and a ton more!!

The Serverless Framework doesn't add any load onto your application. It is essentially an Infrastructure as Code tool to help you compose an application out of a collection of managed services that are all pay per use and do not bill by the hour with no managing VMs, app updates, OS updates, networking issues, load balancing etc.

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.

But it does save an enormous amount of time. We have numerous customers using tools like the Serverless Framework to help put together sophisticated systems in days that would have traditionally taken months. I've experienced it myself personally and worked with multiple customers who see the same thing.

Its also not the initial time saving. After implementation, infrastructure maintenance is almost non-existent because the services are all managed for you and you can focus on providing direct value and not worrying about whether your infrastructure can meet your needs.

There are some significant high volume cases. We work with companies doing billions of Lambda invocations per month and realising large cost saving benefits. Lambda itself is usually the smallest part of the bill as one of the advantages of building serverless applications is you shift the responsibility of certain execution to specially designed managed services as opposed to code consuming CPU cycles; for example API Gateway takes over routing, S3 takes over file system calls, etc. A large portion of savings organisations see though is in time to production, as well as the overhead of managing servers and container clusters which is a lot more costly than you might think. Especially in the environment we are in now where qualified Dev Ops talent is hard to come by and at a premium. Sure, a developer can take some time to try and learn how to put together some infrastructure, but that's time taken away from adding direct value to business needs and not to mention the fall out when things go pear shaped later because it turns out a few hours Googling doesn't turn someone into a DevOps expert.

I'm afraid there are some innacuracies 1. Aggregations can be stored within DynamoDB, you just need to setup how those are calculated, usually with DynamoDB streams and Lambda. You do not need to do it within the application at request time. 2. "Local Indexes" isn't entirely accurate. Its called a Partition key and you can't avoid using a partition key, its kind of the pivotal query mechanism of a table. 3. 10GB is not the limit of a partition. AWS's own documentation states that once a partition approaches 10GB it will be split.

This is why DynamoDB has become my datastore of choice lately.

Unfortunately for those times where you have little to 0 traffic you can't stop paying for your infrastructure like API Gateway can do for you.

Not unless you also make sure all downstream services are similarly auto-scaling using something like DyanmoDB etc so that capacity can be managed further down. This is the idea of Serverless. Not just taking one aspect of your stack and abstracting it out to a managed service but using managed services across teh baord to help maintain that same "autoscaling" feature.

I am going to add that Lambda cold starts are pretty overblown unless you really do have an application that is super sensitive to latency (i.e. you are doing stock trading or something else pretty latency crazy). Most applications can use Lambda and pretty much never worry about cold starts. Consistent traffic keeps Lambda's warm and I've seen services at their busiest suffer less than 1% coldstarts.