Serverless promises zero infrastructure management and infinite scalability. The reality is more nuanced — here's when serverless is the right architectural choice.
Serverless computing — where cloud providers run code in response to events and charge per execution rather than per server-hour — promises to eliminate infrastructure management while enabling automatic scaling. As a web development company India team that has deployed serverless architectures extensively, Scult.in has clear, experience-based views on when serverless delivers on its promise and when it introduces more problems than it solves.
When Serverless Wins
Serverless is the correct choice for: event-driven processing (image resizing on upload, webhook handlers, scheduled data processing jobs); APIs with highly variable or unpredictable traffic patterns where paying for idle capacity is wasteful; and prototypes and MVPs where infrastructure management overhead should be minimized to focus engineering resources on product. AWS Lambda, Vercel Functions, and Cloudflare Workers are our preferred platforms depending on the use case.
Serverless Limitations to Understand
Serverless has meaningful limitations: cold start latency (50–500ms for the first invocation after an idle period, problematic for synchronous API endpoints where latency matters); execution time limits (15 minutes maximum for AWS Lambda, problematic for long-running data processing); and statelessness (each invocation is independent, requiring external state stores for anything requiring memory between invocations). Our custom website development team designs stateless function logic and uses Redis/Upstash for session state in serverless deployments.
