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Understanding Total Cost of Ownership of Serverless and Container Applications

It costs much more than your monthly AWS bill to build and maintain an app in production

Allen Helton
Better Programming
7 min readNov 9, 2022

Image by jcomp on Freepik

Last week I published an article discussing when serverless is more expensive than containers. In that post, I did a simple comparison between Lambda, EC2, and App Runner to show relative compute costs.

I also mentioned something a few times in that article that I realized probably needs to be clarified a bit. I qualified my findings by stating that even though we found a tipping point where serverless is more expensive than provisioned resources, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is still lower.

Total cost of ownership is probably not a new concept to many of you reading this post, but in case it is, I want to discuss it and talk about specifics when we compare serverless and serverful applications.

When we talk about a company’s cost to successfully run an application in production, we must consider more than our monthly AWS bill. Everything that goes into the operation of that app factors into the cost.

Contributors to total cost of ownership:

  • Infrastructure — Compute, provisioned components, storage

Allen Helton
Allen Helton

Written by Allen Helton

I am an AWS serverless hero with a strong focus on API design and standardization, event-driven architectures, and software automation.

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