> If you (or your company) are paying cloud fees for hosting your services (including serverless), you are absolutely throwing money away, perhaps for a "good" reason ('we have a huge rails codebase'), if you ignore this information.
It’s worth pointing out that in some cases developer productivity can swamp server cost. It might be reasonable to pay the server bill necessary to develop in Ruby rather than C++, for example.
Obviously the relationship between performance and developer productivity isn’t strictly linear.
I recently wanted to build a serverless application, but as far as I can tell, no serverless platform takes code in C or C++, so I was stuck working in a language I didn't know well.
There may be an opportunity for someone to build a serverless platform that uses verified functions in C/C++/Rust, so you can get both performance and convenience.
This used to be harder -- you would set the lambda up for the go language runtime, but send your own statically linked binary with a special name instead of a compiled go artifact. But now AWS offers Custom Runtimes[0]. So you can set up the infra using some convenient tool such as AWS CloudFormation templates, terraform, or ansible, and then deploy your custom runtime c/c++ build from there (again, using ansible or AWS CLI or whatever). If you're using rust, there are now ways to make that work, including plugins for the popular "serverless" (sls) framework to deploy rust builds[1]
[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/runtimes-custom...
[1] https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-rust-runtime
It’s worth pointing out that in some cases developer productivity can swamp server cost. It might be reasonable to pay the server bill necessary to develop in Ruby rather than C++, for example.
Obviously the relationship between performance and developer productivity isn’t strictly linear.