Re: I worry the author is bluring Capabilites and Serverless Environments
@Trevor_Pott I absolutly agree that a servless environment lowers the barriers to delivering some fairly impressive looking functionality, however we have found a way to do a lot more than pull data in and out of different features.
Part of what we do in our own code involves extensive file analysis, transformation and generation. Some of this is all our own work and some utilises the same third party libraries that we have used in our native applications.
There are potential solutions to parts of what we are doing, offered as capabilities by the cloud providers however our need is very niche and not what those capabilities are aimed at meeting. The pricing model for this capability is so out of kilter for what we need at the scale that we need it that it is more cost effective to do it ourselves inside the Serverless Environment they offer for our code to run in.
This niche element does bring something else into the conversation, the impressive looking functionality that can be bolted together easily faces a significant commercial challenge if it is to become anything other than a gateway to other things.
The technical barriers to entry or competition to anything built this way is very low, if there is the slightest possibility of gaining something from a solution built in this way then competition will quickly emerge driving down the margins possibly to zero if the gains to others do not require them to earn from it. Should that application be generic enough to access a large market then you can expect to see the cloud providers bolting things together themselves and offering it in a much slicker package.
We have migrated or cancelled some work after starting it as functionality we needed within our solution became available to us and was packaged up and delivered more effectively by the cloud providers, I expect this trend to continue meaning that it is the complex niche products able to flex to customers needs that will survive being commoditised for the longest.