The 2024 State of Serverless: When to Use It and When to Avoid It

Serverless computing — running code without provisioning or managing servers — has become a mainstream architectural pattern. But “serverless” is not the right answer for every workload, and the cold start problem, observability challenges, and vendor lock-in risks are real.

Serverless Sweet Spots

Event-driven processing (S3 uploads, SQS messages, webhook handlers), scheduled jobs, and edge computing are the workloads where serverless delivers the best cost and operational efficiency. Long-running compute, stateful workloads, and latency-sensitive applications are better served by containers.