As someone on a two-man-team who runs a lot of little "utility" functions in AWS Lambda with the Serverless Framework[1] to support our DevOps / Build processes, it's been one of the most productive tools in my toolkit (after the initial learning curve, of course).
It allows me to stand up a practically maintenance-free endpoint in a matter of hours (usually to glue separate services together):
* Want to run a quick ETL process to refresh some tables or pull some data down from a third-party endpoint?
* Want to expose a quick usage report for the project manager?
* Want to send a slack message when a build finishes from TeamCity so QA can jump on it?
* Want to monitor the rate of Crashlytics logs and send a warning to slack if it breeches a threshold?
There are tons of "one-off" little processes that now just automatically run and don't require server upkeep. Most of them are functionally independent, so having them as separate functions makes sense (when we do need to coordinate, that's done through Step Functions).
Note: I still don't think that they are a great fit for production services (and more fits one-off and cron usage patterns)
[1] https://www.serverless.com/
It allows me to stand up a practically maintenance-free endpoint in a matter of hours (usually to glue separate services together):
* Want to run a quick ETL process to refresh some tables or pull some data down from a third-party endpoint?
* Want to expose a quick usage report for the project manager?
* Want to send a slack message when a build finishes from TeamCity so QA can jump on it?
* Want to monitor the rate of Crashlytics logs and send a warning to slack if it breeches a threshold?
There are tons of "one-off" little processes that now just automatically run and don't require server upkeep. Most of them are functionally independent, so having them as separate functions makes sense (when we do need to coordinate, that's done through Step Functions).
Note: I still don't think that they are a great fit for production services (and more fits one-off and cron usage patterns)
[1] https://www.serverless.com/