[mike_hearn]

Serverless/FaaS takes care of the following things that you otherwise need to do yourself:

1. Provisioning VMs and copying the right files up to them.

2. Linking them together behind an HTTP load balancer, which itself needs to be on one or more VMs and possibly DNS balancing.

3. Configuring that load balancer to respond on HTTPS endpoints and health check backends.

4. Collecting logs etc to a central place.

5. Making sure servers restart if they need to for versioning or crash reasons.

6. Shutting it all down and cleaning it up if you stop using them.

That's pretty much it. People like it because doing UNIX sysadmin work sucks. The usability just isn't very good.