> It costs how much?!
Less than $5/month. Yes, on AWS. Serverless (the genuine kind, which scales to zero with pay-per-request) is pretty much free until you have actual users, and once you have actual users, you have actual revenue to pay your cloud bills. Unless your ($revenue / $hosting_costs) is less than 1.0, in which case, you don't have a business.
> "(LISP) programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing". A specific technology product never exists in a vaccuum — it has to communicate and co-exist with other components in the system. There are costs associated with every choice, often hidden costs.
An odd choice of quote, considering the author is promoting choices that costs orders of magnitude more money in the earliest stages, and inevitably provoke high migration costs when it comes time to move off those platforms.
> Cultivate a culture of ruthlessly fighting complexity
Again, an odd claim. Stacks like AWS Lambda and DynamoDB let me forget about scaling concerns* (asterisk because this is true in the early stages, slightly less true later, but still mostly true compared to traditional architecture). Those concerns absolutely rear their head when handing off to a site like Render that refuses to publish public pricing for their largest database instances, or talk about very common usecases like read replicas for analytics workloads.
> the harsh truth is that neither Lambda Functions, nor Kubernetes, nor Kafka on their own will magically make your app work correctly, be performant and deliver value.
But Redis, PostgreSQL, and PaaS-style service deployment magically will? You mean, early startup CTOs need to actually think about the architecture they propose to build to satisfy business needs? gasp
> "Why do we think this choice will provide the most value for users compared to the alternatives?"
Because serverless means not needing to hire DevOps. Because most companies running Kubernetes do not get anywhere near the ~38+% efficiency (last time I ran the numbers, and that's for production environments, not even including staging/testing/development environments) they need to make Kubernetes more cost-efficient than AWS Lambda, because developers just don't have time to figure out why the hell their services need a guaranteed vCPU, won't perform with less, and in the meantime their services are using less than 20% of the resources they requested - and they particularly don't have time to figure it out when Customer Support is happy, Product is happy, and Finance will cough up whatever budget is needed so long as Engineering says that it's "necessary". Because founders who actually think about optimizing for value, will optimize for what is scarce, and what is actually scarce is not money (plenty of money out there looking for the right investment opportunities that check all the right boxes), it is people. Serverless means hiring fewer people because you hand off undifferentiated heavy lifting.