FaaS or not to FaaS. Visible and invisible benefits of the Serverless paradigm at AWS User Group Qatar

When we talk about prices, we often only talk about Lambda costs. In our applications, however, we rarely use only Lambda. Usually we have other building blocks like API Gateway, data sources like SNS, SQS or Kinesis. We also store our data either in S3 or in serverless databases like DynamoDB or recently in Aurora Serverless. All of these AWS services have their own pricing models to look out for. In this talk, we will draw a complete picture of the total cost of ownership in serverless applications and present a decision-making list for determining if and whether to rely on serverless paradigm in your project. In doing so, we look at the cost aspects as well as other aspects such as understanding application lifecycle, software architecture, platform limitations, organizational knowledge and plattform and tooling maturity. We will also discuss current challenges adopting serverless such as lack of high latency ephemeral storage, unsufficient network performance and missing security features.