Hello and thanks for reading

Your question is good because I often saw on tweeter that Cloud Run and other FaaS product are terribly expensive compare to the same VM size, with a COS (Container-optimized OS).

I worked more than 10 years in a traditional IT field (not in Cloud, and thus without serverless) and today I can’t find any clue for find the traditional computing (on a VM) better than serverless

Of course, you can compare the raw cost VM VS Serverless cost. Compare the performance with no cold start on VM, the capability to run several container on the same VM with no or few impact on the performances…

BUT…

• What about the scalability? How do you manage it? How do you scale to 0? How many server do you have to reserve in parallel in case of spiky traffic?
• What about the High Availability? How many server in how many zone do you have to reserve?
• What about the VMs outage? Do you have an Ops team OnCall to answer 24/7?
• What about the patching strategy? What about the SSL certificate management and renewal? How many time do you spend on this task?
• What about the security management equivalent of the free Google Front End? How do you manage it? What is your protection against DDOS?
• BONUS: what about your environment concern if you have underutilized VMs compare to shared cluster of serverless environment?

All the answers that I find here are far more expensive than the serverless cost. K8S is a first answer for solving lot of pain points, without being perfect or cheaper.

I’m serverless fan and I maybe have wrong. However, if you have inputs on these topics I’m interested to know them!

Best