[throwboatyface]

Serverless is a paradigm where you pay for capacity, not for a specific number of instances. It's extending "cattle, not pets" beyond VMs to databases.

In theory it provides better incentives for both parties:

Customers don't have to pick instance size, etc. to try and accomodate their workload. They can buy throughput, etc. in fractions of an actual instance. They can look at their quota usage to determine whether to "scale up" or "scale down".

Service providers are incentivized to optimize their software. If you sell instances + a service on top, there's a perverse incentive not to make your code too fast or people will buy fewer instances. In serverless, providers are incentivized to reduce their costs and optimize the entire stack.

Scale to zero isn't necessarily a property of serverless - a service provider can agree to keep your data on ice for free, but that's a business decision.

[Freeaqingme]

Also, it's a way for AWS to reuse very old hardware where customers don't think about the specifications of the underlying hardware.

[sspiff]

I mean, the inverse incentive to hobble performance is still there for all the serverless stuff that bills by time spent.