I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option.
I was all gung-ho about serverless for a while. I wanted to release a demo for my product and thought I'd cut through all the hassles of managing my own server.
I found it bewildering. It was a whole new skillset with new benefits, but also new considerations and headaches. When push came to shove and the clock to release my demo started ticking down, I just went back to a linux server.
I use the same linux distro at home and on the server, and there are about 3 technologies I need installed. On retrospect I think I made the right decision, but happy to have my mind changed.
I've yet to find someone explain a serverless API based setup that isn't more complicated than good old fashioned LAMP or equivalent. Serverless seems to always come out more expensive as well.
I've been exploring serverless for a project at work, and this is my conclusion too. It's great that we don't need to manage any servers and can easily deploy tasks with one command - but we already have infrastructure to do all that for that for our existing apps.
For someone starting out you don't need to worry about learning Linux and how to configure Apache to serve SSL certificates in the right way, but that is important to know, unless you are happy to always rely on (and pay for) someone else to do that.
To me serverless is similar to Heroku, it's great for starting out but as you start to grow it's going to quickly become a lot cheaper to maintain you own systems. Except with serverless it's not so easy to self-host because you end up relying on all the tooling the vendor provides.
I was all gung-ho about serverless for a while. I wanted to release a demo for my product and thought I'd cut through all the hassles of managing my own server.
I found it bewildering. It was a whole new skillset with new benefits, but also new considerations and headaches. When push came to shove and the clock to release my demo started ticking down, I just went back to a linux server.
I use the same linux distro at home and on the server, and there are about 3 technologies I need installed. On retrospect I think I made the right decision, but happy to have my mind changed.