serverless
54 articles on serverless — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Step Functions cost: Standard vs Express and the 100x difference
Standard workflows bill $0.025 per 1,000 state transitions; Express bills per request + duration. For high-volume workflows the gap is 50-100x. Here's which to use and why high-frequency Standard workflows blow up.
Azure Functions cost: Consumption vs Premium plan
Consumption bills per execution and scales to zero; Premium bills ~$150/month per always-on instance for no cold starts and VNet. Here's the crossover and the min-instances trap.
Aurora Serverless v2 cost: what an ACU really costs you
Aurora Serverless v2 bills per ACU-hour (~$0.12) scaling in 0.5-ACU steps, with a ~$44/month floor unless you enable scale-to-zero. Here's when it beats provisioned Aurora and when it doesn't.
Cloud Run vs GKE cost: when serverless beats a node pool
Cloud Run bills per request-second and scales to zero; GKE bills for nodes 24/7. The cheaper option comes down to utilization. Here's the crossover, the min-instances trap, and where Autopilot fits.
Containers vs serverless: the cost crossover at 2-3M requests/day
Lambda wins for sporadic and event-driven workloads. Containers win for steady high-volume traffic. The crossover is around 2-3M requests/day for typical APIs. Here's the math, the workload archetypes, and a decision framework.
Estimating AWS Lambda costs from Terraform
Lambda is the most mis-estimated AWS service. Here's why cost tools show $0 by default, what data to feed them for accurate numbers, and the four optimization levers that actually move the bill.