Here's a strong opinion semi-loosely held: The fundamental difference between functions-as-a-service and just deploying to a damn server is that you get the ab

Here's a strong opinion semi-loosely held: The fundamental difference between functions-as-a-service and just deploying to a damn server is that you get the ability to scale very quickly. Our app has a feature which is very demanding but used infrequently. We can split the workload and spin up dozens of lambdas instantly to provide acceptable response times. Wouldn't want to have a server over-provisioned to handle that amount of scale at all times. All the other purported benefits (e.g. you can plug Lambda into S3 events) are just ways to do vendor lockin to yourself. And the ops-less-ness is cool but also you could deploy to a container platform for that.