Episode 35: Metered Pricing: Everyone Hates That! Charge Based on Value

Did you know that you can now run Lambda functions for 15 minutes, instead of dealing with 5-minute timeouts? Although customers will probably never need that much time, it helps dispel the belief that serverless isn’t useful for some use cases because of such short time limits.

Today, we’re talking to Adam Johnson, co-founder and CEO of IOpipe. He understands that some people may misuse the increased timeframe to implement things terribly. But he believes the responsibility of a framework, platform, or technology should not be to hinder certain use cases to make sure developers are working within narrow constraints. Substantial guardrails can make developers shy away. With Lambda, they can do what they want, which is good and bad.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Companies are using serverless as a foundation and for critical functions
• Serverless can be painful in some areas, but gaps are going away
• Investing in the Future: Companies doing lift-and-shift to AWS are looking at technology they should choose today that’s going to be prominent in 3 years
• Serverless empowers new billing models and traces the flow of capital; companies can choose to make pricing more complicated or simplified
• What value are you providing? Serverless can offer flexible pricing foundation
• When something breaks, you need to be made aware of such problems; Amazon bill doesn’t change based on what IOpipe does, which is not true with others
• Developers are the ones woken up and on call, so IOpipe focuses on providing them value and help; they are not left alone to figure out and fix problems
• Serverless and event-driven applications offer a new type of instrumentation and observability to collect telemetry on every event  
• For serverless to go mainstream, AWS needs to up its observability level to gather data to answer questions
• AWS, in the serverless space, needs to make significant progress on cold starts in other languages, and offer more visibility and easier deployment out of the box

Links:

• IOpipe
• Episode 16: There are Still Servers, but We Don't Care About Them
• Lambda
• Google App Engine
• Python
• Node.js
• Kubernetes
• Simon Wardley
• DynamoDB
• re:Invent
• Perl
• PowerShell
• Digital Ocean