Member-only story

When Is Serverless More Expensive Than Containers?

A certain amount of traffic tips the scales to make serverless a more expensive bill at the end of the month

Allen Helton
Better Programming
6 min readNov 3, 2022

--

Image by user18526052 on Freepik

I talk to a lot of people about serverless. Shocking, I know.

When discussing the viability of serverless for production applications, I’m often hit with the same two arguments:

Cold starts are so bad we can’t use serverless” and “aren’t you worried about the cost at scale?

We’ve already covered why we should stop talking about cold starts. But the question about cost at scale is one we haven’t covered yet.

It’s also not a black-and-white argument.

Serverless applications offer significant total cost of ownership (TCO) advantages compared to containers. You don’t have to spend time (which is money) on server maintenance, installing patches, rebooting services in an invalid state, managing load balancers, etc….

Source

But for the sake of argument, we can compare the total bill and put the other contributing factors aside. Those can be hard to prove objectively when…

--

--

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.

Responses (18)

What are your thoughts?