Ask HN: Is Serverless Overkill?

In recent years, many new serverless service providers have been released for everything (Neon – Postgres, Cloudflare D1 – SQLite-like DB, GCP Functions, Vercel edge functions, etc.). However, people have been complaining about their complexity and overkill in the beginning.

More recently, I've witnessed friends prefer serverful providers for their apps because they offer more control, and are cheaper and simpler to get started with (their words). Serverful platforms like Render, Railway, or Fly.io have also become a bit more popular.

Both approaches come with their trade offs and limitations, especially at different scale and costs.

So, which way, western man: is Serverful the Future? Quo vadis, web development?

Nothing has shifted. It might have gained some market share but that's about it.

There are times though when serverless may not be a good idea:

- Atypical technology stack. If the stack you need, and actually need, isn't accounted for then you're on your own.

- Continuous, 24x7 application load. You'll have to do the cost analysis, but you may find you're better off provisioning a server.

- You want to "lift and shift" existing assets into the cloud.

Brand-new, greenfield project? Consider serverless first.