> Heroku is not Serverless in the modern definition of the word

Heroku seems to be serverless in the way cloud vendors, including Amazon, have been using it recently; it's not serverless in the sense that Amazon first introduced it, which was a synonym for Lambda. It's pretty similar to GAE, which is definitely within the current usage of “serverless”.

Heroku is just an easier way to deploy to servers. It doesn’t scale down to zero, scale up as needed, etc. You still have distinct servers that you know about, can manage. S3, Fargate (Docker), DynamoDB, even SNS/SQS are considered Serverless by AWS’s nomenclature.

It doesn't scale to zero, but the article was about how much more it costs running only serverless 0-24, but how hard it is to fiddle with Linux/deployment/CNAMEs/etc. (Especially that they have constant load, 10+M req/day.)

And so it seems to miss the obvious middle ground between raw EC2 (or Elastic Beanstalk managed EC2) and full on-demand Lambda, which is modern managed hosting (PaaS, Deis/Dokku/Heroku).

i'm not sure Fargate is considered Serverless.

“What is Serverless Architecture”

https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/serverless-architectures-learn...

https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/

AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon ECS that allows you to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, and scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers

Sure, it's not FaaS, but it fits the "you don't have to care for OS and servers" criteria, and it's always on (and auto-scalable).

Running FaaS on AWS without knowing anything about servers and "OS stuff" screams like building the roof without the foundation. And I know that it sounds convenient to run everything as isolated little abstract functions, and ... it works, but it's pricey. But you can do it for cheap, you can deploy Kubless or OpenFaaS (or OpenWhisk or whatever is Apache's equivalent). Naturally AWS exploits this knowledge gap for a lot of their managed services.

It’s not a “knowledge gap”. I know how to set up databases, queueing/messaging servers, software load balancers, etc., but maintenance takes time and companies pay to save time.

That's true. And that's one of the things that a FaaS/PaaS gives you. Heroku's 24 time limit is perfect for eliminating the problems with starting the environment for each request, but still completely absolves the client from doing the grunt OS maintenance.