The the end of the day, the real reason I went with Lambda to build this is that when I started, I didn't know anything about spinning up a server, building a storage array, or serving an web request. But what I did know was how to write a Python script to extract weather data from a file. The really cool thing about some of these cloud tools is that they let me ignore all of those (very difficult) problems and just focus on the data
Exactly what the cloud is best used for imho. You can focus on your core problems and still shift to a different solution later on when that becomes more effective cost wise.
But still, when I first started in AWS we had lift and shift'ed most of our platform onto AWS and when it came to adding new features I first looked at Lambda instead of building out on the existing platform. The speed at which I could setup the feature and start measuring and iterating on it was so much better compared to doing it on our existing platform. Even though that was pretty ironed out and fully automated.
