Lambda is not useful. It solves a few problems but creates even more new problems.
Some problems include:
- It makes managing multiple environments (e.g. development, staging, production) almost impossible.
- It makes debugging difficult because you can't run the code on your own machine and step through the code. Most projects cannot be tested end-to-end due to environment incompatibilities between different services and front-ends running locally... It's a fact that multiple developers can't share a single development environment because each developer needs to work with their own test data but Lambda doesn't allow this.
- Lambda adds all sorts of unexpected limits on your code; e.g. cold starts, maximum function execution duration and others.
- The lock-in factor is significant; once you're hooked into Lambda and all the surrounding services that it encourages, you cannot leave and you have no bargaining power in terms of hosting costs and your future is entirely dependent on Amazon.
- Other AWS services that you can integrate with Lambda also exacerbate problems related to handling multiple environments and debugging. Services like Elastic Transcoder and S3 are blackboxes and are very hard to debug. If something goes wrong, sometimes the only way to resolve the problem is to contact Amazon support and spend weeks sending messages back and forth to figure out the issue.
- You're contributing to centralization of wealth and power instead of helping small companies and small open source projects. You're helping to turn Amazon into yet another too big to fail company with infinite leverage on the rest of the economy.
- It takes the fun out of coding. As a developer, you no longer feel any ownership or responsibility over the code that you produce, you're just handing over all that code to Amazon. In fact, it might as well belong to Amazon because that's the only company that is able to execute that code. It doesn't help with employee turnover.
The main reasons why Lambda is popular are because Amazon spent a fortune on marketing it and there are a lot of vested interests in the industry who want it to succeed (to drive up Amazon share price).
