Yielding of control

As with cloud computing, adopters of the serverless paradigm make a conscious decision to host their artifacts in the cloud provider's infrastructure. This is referred to as yielding control to the providers. It is obvious that the production systems are exposed to the vagaries of the environment of the provider. Internal issues affecting the providers indirectly affect your production systems. The big players in the market, like AWS, Google, and Azure, among others, invest heavily in mitigating and reducing such impacts, but there are times when things do go south. Adopters need to take cognizance of this fact and design their serverless systems to be adaptable and fault tolerant.

For example, during the outage in the AWS US-East-1 region in early 2017, adopters that relied solely on the service uptime guarantee of AWS faced significant outage. But adopters that had a backup planned for it, like Netflix, did not face any outage.

For systems requiring stricter compliance, serverless might not be a fair choice to make, as typically, such compliances require on-premise and strictly controlled hardware.