The Solution Architect’s Guide to Serverless

You’ve undoubtedly heard about serverless and read about the benefits. But implementing serverless into your app doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

For years I’ve been proud to say I build 100% serverless cloud applications. I wore it as a badge of honor that the software I designed could elastically scale at every tier and cost virtually nothing to run at small to medium scale.

I used to introduce myself to people in tech as a serverless architect and make the best effort to build apps with Lambda, Step Functions, or direct integrations through API Gateway as the only form of compute.

But I was wrong in my thinking. That’s not necessarily the ideal way to build software. The best way to build software is the one that solves the business problem with the lowest total cost of ownership.

Yes, serverless services are great, but let’s be honest — not every business has the budget to upskill its entire engineering staff. Nor do they have the appetite to refactor everything to be completely serverless, and that’s ok. I’m going to assume you’re here because you’re interested in incorporating some serverless components into your existing stateful applications.