Broadly speaking, it started out as a greenfield/experimental project with buy-in from senior management that is now going through the initial phase of productization and productionization. Although the AWS bill sounds expensive the whole project was effectively done by 3 developers including myself (2 backend/full stack and 1 frontend). There were also some deliberate management decisions that greatly prolonged implementation time - we could have easily shaved 8 months off that figure taking a more straightforward path.
That is still a year long, 1/4M or more speculative investment. I would not moan too loudly about mgmt interference prolonging the project - that was a rare piece of long term willingness to invest for future technical gains - rare in my experience. (But imo the only way)
Yes, it was/is a rare opportunity and I'm very grateful I had/have it. (That being said, the potential upsides are in the range of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, even with only minimal success - so there is definitely a very real business incentive to invest in the project.) The prolongment I'm referring to isn't to do with the project being put on hold or anything like that. Essentially what happened was it was decided we'd build an "alpha" version of the stack to 'validate' the value of the project even though it was plainly clear what we had to do. The alpha stack nominally was supposed to be a cheap, quick version of the real architecture (which we'd already designed) whose supposed savings were gained by substituting manual processes for some of the APIs rather than actually building them. The end result was a. confirming what we already knew in that yes, the proposed functionality is fundamentally useful (very obvious from the outset) and b. a huge diversion of time and effort doing throwaway work that was about 65% as much work as just doing it the right way would have been, with the additional burden of having to perform the manual "API" functions, operational overhead of maintaining that stack while implementing the real one, burden of having to migrate data from the alpha stack to new stack once it was ready, and work to deprecate/tear it down once it was completely out-of-use. The overall wasted time was easily 8 months.
So without digging in to who the client is etc, are you saying that serverless architecture is today, validated enough that the AWS bill can be cut by ... what 25%? more?
That sounds like great savings (plus nice fat contractor bills for rewriting as lambda) - but is it a hit for amazon
(I suspect amazon views it as "kill your own babies" survival but am interested in the margin effect on the data centre business - it's twenty years since i touched a business model of a DC)
PS
I get the prolongment issue - it sounds sensible in the 20 seconds it was covered in the approval meeting, but not when the details are looked at.
This is a new project, not migration of anything existing. "Upsides" was referring to business value of the project itself, not cost savings of migrating to serverless.
