1/ Super-interesting piece in @ThRegister on the BBC going serverless: https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/04/bbc_embraces_aws_serverless/

They talk about whether this is a smart move financially…

2/ Ycombinator geniuses shriek “But Lambda is more expensive per CPU-second than EC2!” BBC responds “But you don’t pay when it’s not working.” Register objects: “But, autoscaling?!?!”

3/ So, first of all, scaling big stateful servers down anywhere near zero during slow spells is hard. Lambda does it for free. Second, with Lambda you're spending a whole lot less time on capacity-planning and host-patching and various other flavors of busywork…

4/ Third, EC2 auto-scaling can rarely be really fast, just because your typical Web server running an app takes a while to spin up and start usefully taking load.

5/5 It seems obvious to me that if the cost is in the same ballpark, you’d rather be serverless.

Having said that, I’d sure love to know what the BBC’s actually cost delta will be.

Also noted: The app that’s being replaced is PHP.