I'm not really interested in the operational overhead that brings for these small services. Cost-wise they might be just about neck-and-neck, but at least I don't need to worry about the server going down, or having outdated software. Lambda gives me scaling, load balancing and redundancy for that $2.

> these small services

I think you might be unintentionally arguing with a strawman, as everyone else here is talking about using monoliths instead of that.

Few people want to administer a bunch of micro services themselves, but running a single service on a box is pretty low effort, even if you duplicate it for fail over/redundancy

By "using monoliths", do you mean bolting all code you write into a single runtime, even if they are not the same service? Because that's not what was in this article. Instead, they took Step Functions and a bunch of Lambda functions, and created a brand new monolith from that.

> define monolith software

In software engineering, a monolithic application describes a single-tiered software application in which the user interface and data access code are combined into a single program from a single platform.

"mono" stands for one/alone/singular, so monolithic is kinda defined to be exactly that, yes.

You can still have multiple monoliths, but they wouldn't communicate with each other and would be entirely separate applications.

I didn't say that my Lambda application communicates with my monolith. Just that I have a monolith and a Lambda application.

From experience I say that the operational overhead to host on Amazon isn't trivial at all.

I like AWS and I would still recommend it. It saves some work but also creates new stuff to do. Especially if you also want the costs be manageable. Automatic updates, configuring a firewall + reverse proxy with automatic certificate renewals and you favorite deployment mechanism isn't more complicated or labor intensive than managing a small application with AWS. You need to interface it just like software you run on your server.

One of the services I host needed to be authenticated by IP. Happens. You easily get a static IP on AWS for incoming traffic. No problem and cheap too. Now try to get one for the other direction... Possible too, but maintenance just became at least as labor intensive as hosting your own machine. AWS just has to fit your scenario and I think many people overestimate how comparatively easier it has become to host a server with feasible security today. Chances are your databases would be less public than if you skip the AWS documentation.