I've noticed serverless conversations tend to split into two camps: People who think it solves everything, and people who think it's a mistake. The reality is much more useful than either extreme. Everyone who sells you on serverless leads with the same three points: no servers to manage, automatic scaling, and you only pay for what you use. All of that is technically true. None of it is the whole story. I've shipped serverless APIs in production — Go Lambdas behind API Gateway, the kind that power real user-facing products. I'm not here to talk you out of it. For the right workload, it's genuinely excellent. But the gaps between the pitch and the reality are specific, and knowing them in advance changes the decisions you make early, when they're still cheap to change. Cold starts are real — just not how you think Lambda cold starts happen when AWS needs to provision a new execution environment for your function. The runtime boots, your init code runs, and then the handler executes.…