I will never understand how we got to this point. Why adding this much complexity for just running a simple service?

It's like teenage sex. You think everyone else is doing it, so you want to do it too.

Funny, I had a junior engineer stand up a notification service. They used terraform and Lambda, had it all scripted. It was cool. Took him all day to do it.

Me... wrote a one line bash script that ran on a cron. Done in a minute.

I’m of the opinion that lambda-as-in-serverless is an evil. I’m also willing to be proven wrong, and might be in time; I wasn’t fond of certain Docker use cases early on either but now containers are The Good.

Are there any other serverless solutions that you'd recommend?

Maybe a more open cloud function solution that could also be self-hosted, should the need arise?

As far as I know, OpenFaaS might serve that niche for some, though of course there will be no cloud solutions as large as Lambda available: https://github.com/openfaas/faas

Also there used to be IronFunctions, but those seem basically abandoned at this point: https://github.com/iron-io/functions