[jshen]

Because the function is the stateless easy part. To make any non trivial system, in a serverless way, you have to use their proprietary stateful systems. IN my case, google pubsub, google data flow, google datastore, Spanner, etc. that’s where the lock in happens.

[fapjacks]

Right, because serverless is actually just a cover for "de-commoditizing" the cloud services that companies like AWS built to commoditize datacenters. You hit the nail on the head. It's not completely useless to help less technical people solve the problems that folks like you and I consider "the easy part" and so people will find a use for it.

But the primary utility of serverless is an attempt at solving Amazon's problem of being commoditized by containers.

[jshen]

I’d say something more nuanced. Serverless is increasing commoditization of one layer of the stack at the cost of de-commoditizing a high layer of the stack. This is what makes it a hard decision to grapple with. You’re getting very real benefits from it, and potentially paying a very real cost sometime down the road when being locked into the propietary system bites you.