[tylerdurden91]

I think what most people are missing here is that they used AWS Step Functions in the wrong place. Part of the blame here is that in over enthusiasm of trying to get more users, AWS doesn't properly educate customers when to use which service. Worse, for each use case AWS has about dozens of options making the choice incredibly hard.

In this case, they probably should have used Step Functions Express, which charges based on duration as opposed to number of transitions and they're looking for "on host orchestration" like orchestrate a bunch of things which usually are done in small time and are done over & over many times. Step functions is better when workflows are running longer, and exactly once semantics are needed. Link for reading differences between Express & standard step functions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_us/step-functions/latest/dg/c....

This also exemplifies the fact that I learned while being at Amazon & AWS that Amazon themselves dont know how best to use AWS. This being one of the great examples. I'll share 1 more:

- In my team within AWS, we were building a new service, and someone proposed to build a whole new micro service to monitor the progress of requests to ensure we dont drop requests. As soon I mentioned about visibility timeout in SQS queues, the whole need for the service went away. Saving Amazon money ($$) & time (also $$). But if I or someone else didn't mention, we would have built it.

I dont think serverless is a silver bullet, but I don't think this is a great example of when not to use serverless. It helps to know the differences between various services and when to use what.

PS: Ex Amazon & AWS here. I have nothing to gain or lose by AWS usage going up or down. I'm currently using a serverless architecture for my new startup which may bias my opinions here.

[tylerdurden91]

Worth mentioning as mentioned in other comments that moving video data around at that scale was a bad choice to begin with. They could have considered fargate and avoided moving the data around so much as well and realized similar reductions in cost. So the wins are not really coming from moving to monolith as much as they're coming from optimizing unnecessary data transfers.

If the article said fargate, which is technically still serverless we could have avoided a whole microservice vs monolith debate or serverless vs hosts/instances debate.