A big downside of current “Serverless” architectures is, well, you don’t have a server! Because of this, some things that we take for granted in web applications today are hard to do in a Serverless model - take real time notifications for example. Usually you’d use SignalR, Socket.IO, or some other framework to help you set up and use websocket connections, but those frameworks require a long-lived connection to a server.

I’ve been geeking out quite a bit over Functions as a Service and the Serverless Framework for the past year or so. I wrote the backend for Play Your Damn Turn using it, and I think it’s great for startup scenarios - you can write something and get it out there without having to worry about the costs of hosting, and if it suddenly becomes popular it’s already built to scale.