[meekins]

As someone with years of experience on serverless stuff on AWS I might be a bit biased BUT I'd argue serverless is the sweet spot for most applications. You need to remember however that most applications aren't your typical startups or other software products but simply some rather boring line of business software nobody outside the company owning it knows of.

Concerning how IT departments in most non-software companies are, the minimal operational burden is a massive advantage and the productivity is great once you have a team with enough cloud expertise. Think bespoke e-commerce backends, product information management systems or data platforms with teams of a handful of developers taking responsibility for the whole application lifecycle.

The cloud expertise part is a hard requirement though but luckily on AWS the curriculum is somewhat standardized through developer and solutions architect certifications. That helps if you need to do handovers to maintenance or similar.

That said, even as a serverless fan, I immediately thought of containers when the performance requirements came up in the article. Same with the earlier trending "serverless sucks" about video processing on AWS. Most of the time serverless is great but it's definitely not a silver bullet.

[awkward]

I like your angle, but most applications is a big difference from most companies. Serverless comes after deciding whether or not to break up the monolith, and after breaking up engineering into separate teams. It's a good way to manage apps with high variance in traffic while keeping cloud spend down.