> Tiny output binaries are also very quick to transfer and spin up in serverless as well - often reducing costs further.
I think people underestimate the benefits of services that can start super quickly (IMHO, "cost" is nowhere near the most significant benefit!).
Fast restarts means your service can respond very quickly to a scale up event (which can make the difference between "things get a little slow for a moment" and "everything comes crashing down"). It also means developers iterating in a cloud environment can get faster feedback, which itself seems underrated. Further, when you push a change that takes down production, the rollback is much faster.
Of course, all of these things have various workarounds (e.g., canary deploys so you're less likely to take down prod in the first place) but if you can have 5MB images instead of 5+GB images you can go a lot farther without needing to implement them. Of course, small images are necessary but not sufficient for fast startups; however, in practice the overwhelming majority of Go programs also start up quickly (although in a cloud context, this can be wasted if they're deployed on bulky distro base images).
I think people underestimate the benefits of services that can start super quickly (IMHO, "cost" is nowhere near the most significant benefit!).
Fast restarts means your service can respond very quickly to a scale up event (which can make the difference between "things get a little slow for a moment" and "everything comes crashing down"). It also means developers iterating in a cloud environment can get faster feedback, which itself seems underrated. Further, when you push a change that takes down production, the rollback is much faster.
Of course, all of these things have various workarounds (e.g., canary deploys so you're less likely to take down prod in the first place) but if you can have 5MB images instead of 5+GB images you can go a lot farther without needing to implement them. Of course, small images are necessary but not sufficient for fast startups; however, in practice the overwhelming majority of Go programs also start up quickly (although in a cloud context, this can be wasted if they're deployed on bulky distro base images).