Introduction
This is in response to the following article by Amazon
And the thoughts of others.
My Take
There is a place for serverless; this was just the wrong tool for the job. Period.
So chalk this up to a terrible idea and implementation; they should have never used serverless and in the way they did. Think about using a power drill as a hammer.
Serverless In-house
Many organizations use serverless in-house on bare-metal for a fraction of the cost of Lamada using containers such as Kubernetes or Docker. There are a few options for self-host serverless OpenFaaS, Fission, OpenWhisk or Knative.
Orchestration, the conductor…
But then you need orchestration to manage containers, restart failed containers and scale containers across bare-metal, private or public cloud. Kubernetes is a considerable endeavour to set up and manage for a small organization. Instead, some organizations put their entire application on a single piece of hardware, such as DHH did with Basecamp and their MSRK tool.
Scaling and Failover
But when that piece of hardware goes down for maintenance or another reason, where's the fault tolerance? That's why Kubernetes (Googles Borg), Docker Swam and Openshift exist. You could also run docker on multiple hosts, bare-metal, ec2, VPS, private or public cloud and build out your orchestration.
Conclusion
Don’t Blame serverless, blame the implementation. Tools exist, and it’s up to the user of that tool to understand how it works and especially with other tools.