[beberlei]

PHP hosters have been doing this for 20 years. You have 100s of customers on a single machine, running with a single Apache/PHP process (and child forks), and only if that Host+URL of a customer is requested that PHP code actually gets executed, then completely discarded from memory after its finished.

PHP is very much comparable to serverless. All that talk about bootstrapping costs in serverless is something PHP developers have been tackling forever.

[sk5t]

This is a very silly equivalence--you're just glorifying vhosts and method dispatch.

[wwweston]

The mechanism isn't the point (and vhosts aren't really either). The point is what a developer (or ops) has to think about when deploying, and in this regard, the default PHP model has a lot in common with serverless.