Author here. This was a fun exercise to produce a semantic search using only free-tier services (which in the case of Cohere means non-commercial use only and in the case of AWS Lambda is limited to one year).

It also marks my first foray into using cloud services for a project. I've long been a cloud sceptic, and doing this confirmed some of my suspicions regarding complexity (mostly the administrative part around roles and URLs), while the coding part itself was a blast.

I find serverless to be needlessly complex. I'd rather write an HTTP server and serve it off of t3.micro instance (also free-tier eligible). So much simpler for side projects.

cebert

What about serverless do you find to be “needlessly complex”?

rcme

There are just too many required parameters to create a single handler. And then you need to do that N times for each handler. Take a look at a complete Terraform example for a lambda: https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-lambd...

For a personal project it's just a bit much in my experience, especially since most personal projects can easily be served by a t3.micro.