Serverless at Scale: Myths vs Reality

A retrospective on migrating a 50M user platform to AWS Lambda. Where it saved money, and where it introduced complexity.

Serverless promises a nirvana of zero operational overhead and infinite scalability. The reality, as always, is more nuanced. For event-driven workloads, it is unbeatable. But for sustained, high-throughput computing, the 'cold start' latency and cost per compute-second can be prohibitive.

We dissect a recent migration of a media streaming platform. We adopted a hybrid approach: containers (Fargate) for the consistent baseline load, and Functions (Lambda) for the spiky, unpredictable user interactions. This optimized cost without sacrificing performance.

The lesson? 'Serverless First' is a good slogan, but 'Right Tool for the Right Job' is better engineering.