Server-less is probably nomenclature that needs to be phased out like &quot;Application Service Provider&quot; or &quot;CORBA.&quot; It focuses too much upon the implementation rather than the value. The value of not having a &quot;server&quot; in most cases is that you don&#x27;t have to operationally manage a new host and incur all the cost of ownership of managing more infrastructure that does not directly add value to your business. Perhaps if you&#x27;re pretty efficient it is better to take this on yourself, but for most companies the trend is accelerating against infrastructure management since most companies are decidedly not experts in managing compute, storage, and networks - I&#x27;ve seen a lot of places in the Fortune 500 and they are inefficient and ineffective at managing their IT as a rule because IT is a cost center normally.<p>As for a better term, perhaps operationally-opaque or &quot;pure service&quot; are starting points? Service is correlated with stronger federation while p2p is decentralized as a rule. I&#x27;d rather avoid SOA which does not say anything about whether you have to manage the operations or dependencies - nobody is calling microservices as &quot;server-less&quot; after all. When people in companies talk about a &quot;services&quot; company they mean that the labor and overhead of management are all outsourced and as a customer you don&#x27;t really care about how they operate as long as they don&#x27;t violate certain OLAs and SLAs. AWS can run Lambda on marmot-based computing on Mars for all I care as long as it meets certain specs. Services compete on cost, SLAs (features are part of SLAs), and OLAs, period.