_JC_Denton

Like many developers I know, I am somewhat set in my ways when building new web projects - it's usually a bunkhouse nginx/express/postgres on an EC2, or Heroku if I am willing to spend the $$. However, with all the apparent advances in serverless technology and the mature DBaaS providers out there, it got me wondering if startups or other developers are realizing the promised benefits of these architectures? To me, it seems like Heroku is the easiest minimal-ops solution out there, but it can get pricey. Even a simple EC2 setup could require fiddling in the AWS console (or CloudFormation templates), ports & security settings, VPCs, DB backups, etc. In both cases you still would need to pay attention to resource allocation.

I see a lot of news about serverless architectures & frameworks, and other hosted services like auth, DB's, etc. Are any startups experimenting with building fully "no-ops" architectures (I use the word as a classification, I realize true no-ops is impossible)? Or at a certain point is the benefit of minimal ops outweighed by the overhead of needing to glue multiple separate services together?