Great breakdown of the serverless pitfalls! The cold start point really resonates. I took the completely opposite approach for my AI automation pipeline — running everything on a local Mac Mini instead of going serverless. Zero cold starts, predictable costs ($0/month after hardware), and full control over the execution environment.
The trade-off is obvious: no auto-scaling and you maintain everything yourself. But for workloads that are always-on (like cron-based AI agents), the "pay per invocation" model actually gets expensive fast.
Curious about your monitoring setup — do you use CloudWatch exclusively, or have you found third-party observability tools worth the cost at production scale?