High Tides, Low Tides: Throughput

The lower your application invocation ratio is, the better it is to go with Functions as it will be more cost effective. That is true both to the “product level” and the “application level”. As you’d be paying your cloud provider per request and according to throughput, this is how’d you’d literally pay for a mistake in a choice between the two, maybe even gravely

Safer but Slower: Latency

When a Function is idle, not handling any incoming requests, it is frozen and later thawed. When not enough Functions instances are available, the infrastructure would then launch a new one. Alas, launching a new one can take from a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds. Expect a substantiated lag could affect your customers for a while. You must first ask yourself if it even has an effect your end customers.

Applications Decoupled: Infrastructure Integrations

A Function’s interconnectedness with other services of your cloud provider is one of its beauties. It can save you a lot of unnecessary, repetitive coding of integrating with other infrastructure cloud services. The presented use cases would have you better understand how to decouple applications, when and why it would be better to use a Function and one day to integrate with other custom infrastructure components. As it is embedded into the infrastructure layer, it is reusable between multiple applications.