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A comparison of Serverless to any kind of compute that uses line-item comparison and, crucially, doesn't mention Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the latter is

A comparison of Serverless to any kind of compute that uses line-item comparison and, crucially, doesn't mention Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the latter is flawed. To conclude that Serverless is more expensive one would have to compare the calculated TCO of managing EC2 against the line-item cost of Lambda. The article is also operating at the small change end of the spectrum where cost differences are basically noise. Replacing the TCO of operating a thousand instances with the line-item cost of lambda would be an improved analysis.

benjaminwootton 7y ago
Came here to say the same. I work in the cloud industry and see this all the time. Moving up the stack costs more in cloud costs, but less in human costs and time to market. Sure he is spending $1000 a month on this setup, but compared to the time and cost involved in managing machines and implementing something like Apigee it is not a lot. This said, of course the optimal choice depends on your use case and profile. In some instances Lambda wins, in others EC2, in others something middle ground like Beanstalk or Fargate.
darkwater 7y ago
This "TCO" thing usually comes out always from people interested in making companies migrate (i.e. consultants). Do you account into this TCO the time spent in retraining an gaining operational, production grade experience with serverless for all the teams involved? It's a one-shot cost, true, but it's a long one. And laying off perfectly capable employees because they are now redundant because serverless has a cost too (financial and emotional)
- owenmarshall 7y ago
  > Do you account into this TCO the time spent in retraining an gaining operational, production grade experience with serverless for all the teams involved? Hopefully, or else it wouldn't be a total cost of ownership! > And laying off perfectly capable employees because they are now redundant because serverless has a cost too (financial and emotional) No doubt. But if your capable employees aren't providing value outside of "keeping the servers humming" there's a very good chance that someone is counting up their fully loaded cost and comparing it to bids from Accenture, Capgemini or Infosys. I'm fairly ambivalent on the whole push towards serverless but arguments like this feel an awful lot like the pushback against virtualization vs. running bare metal.
  - darkwater 7y ago
    > No doubt. But if your capable employees aren't providing value outside of "keeping the servers humming" But you would usually consider serverless to need less people to manage it. So, even if they all work hard, someone will be not that useful one day or another. Anyway I really don't see all this fuss about doing more with less (or doing more with the same) going serverless if you are already using infra as code and have a 100% automated CD/CI pipeline. A greenfield project? Totally! But in an established org with good practices? Dunno.

benjaminwootton 7y ago

Came here to say the same. I work in the cloud industry and see this all the time. Moving up the stack costs more in cloud costs, but less in human costs and time to market. Sure he is spending $1000 a month on this setup, but compared to the time and cost involved in managing machines and implementing something like Apigee it is not a lot. This said, of course the optimal choice depends on your use case and profile. In some instances Lambda wins, in others EC2, in others something middle ground like Beanstalk or Fargate.

darkwater 7y ago

This "TCO" thing usually comes out always from people interested in making companies migrate (i.e. consultants). Do you account into this TCO the time spent in retraining an gaining operational, production grade experience with serverless for all the teams involved? It's a one-shot cost, true, but it's a long one. And laying off perfectly capable employees because they are now redundant because serverless has a cost too (financial and emotional)

owenmarshall 7y ago
> Do you account into this TCO the time spent in retraining an gaining operational, production grade experience with serverless for all the teams involved? Hopefully, or else it wouldn't be a total cost of ownership! > And laying off perfectly capable employees because they are now redundant because serverless has a cost too (financial and emotional) No doubt. But if your capable employees aren't providing value outside of "keeping the servers humming" there's a very good chance that someone is counting up their fully loaded cost and comparing it to bids from Accenture, Capgemini or Infosys. I'm fairly ambivalent on the whole push towards serverless but arguments like this feel an awful lot like the pushback against virtualization vs. running bare metal.
- darkwater 7y ago
  > No doubt. But if your capable employees aren't providing value outside of "keeping the servers humming" But you would usually consider serverless to need less people to manage it. So, even if they all work hard, someone will be not that useful one day or another. Anyway I really don't see all this fuss about doing more with less (or doing more with the same) going serverless if you are already using infra as code and have a 100% automated CD/CI pipeline. A greenfield project? Totally! But in an established org with good practices? Dunno.