Serverless Is a Scam

Every time someone reaches for serverless to build a simple backend, a container dies inside me. “Serverless” promises simplicity, scalability, and zero maintenance. In practice, it gives you time limits, vendor lock-in, surprise billing, and complexity disguised as convenience. You end up duct-taping together SaaS services just to do what a Docker container can do out of the box. Let me break it down — and preempt the counterarguments along the way. Serverless means you deploy individual functions to a cloud platform, and it handles provisioning, scaling, and execution. You don’t manage the server — you just drop your code in and go. At least, that’s the dream. Here’s what you actually get: Strict runtime limits (e.g., 15-minute max execution on AWS Lambda) Zero state retention between runs Cold starts (unless you pay extra, and "pre-warm" your functions) Opaque debugging Vendor-specific quirks and configs A lot of YAML And if you want to do literally anything non-trivial ... Read full article.