I tried serverless in earnest this quarter. AWS Lambda was the entry point — triggered by S3 events, SNS topics, or API Gateway.
Pros:
- Zero infra management
- Great for bursty workloads
- Tight integration with other AWS services
Gotchas:
- Cold starts on VPC-attached Lambdas
- Local development/debugging friction
- Observability required CloudWatch gymnastics
Use case: we built a log-parsing pipeline that fanned out processing using SNS + Lambda + DynamoDB.
Still not a silver bullet, but a powerful addition to the toolbox.