The Unfulfilled Promise of Serverless
I have a theory that even though the serverless trend is sold as a technical revolution, it&#x27;s mostly due to accounting practices.<p>Serverless is purely about CAPEX, vs OPEX.<p>Companies are so loath to make capital expenditures (CAPEX) that they will willingly let their employees waste thousands of extra hours learning  a new development model so they can pay Amazon using operating expenses instead.<p>And it&#x27;s funny because even though amazon has no choice but to use capital expenditures to
populate their datacentres with machines, they are offering lambda as a way to monetize the unused cycles.<p>So lambdas are being twice used as a kind of compromise to fill in the gaps on an accounting sheet.<p>I believe the joke is on us as technical people. We twist ourselves into knots to promote this new development model as a <i>technical</i> innovation, which it really isn&#x27;t.<p>We have just made the time-sharing service (they used to have them in the 60s and 70s) fashionable again. (Along with the long feedback cycle which makes working on these systems so frustrating.)