Why Engineers Should Start with Serverless and Only Move Down When Necessary

A cloud architect argues that teams should begin infrastructure decisions at the highest level of managed services — such as SaaS or serverless — and only move to containers or servers when there is a clear, documented reason. The 'compute ladder' framework ranks compute options from fully managed at the top to self-operated servers at the bottom, with each step down adding operational burden. Key criteria for choosing a service include pay-per-use pricing, full manageability, and built-in high availability. The author emphasizes that serverless architecture is largely about composing existing services rather than writing custom code, and recommends preferring configuration over code wherever possible. Stepping down the ladder is acceptable for legitimate constraints like execution limits or sustained high load, but not for reasons like team familiarity or speculative future needs.