Is Serverless a Scam?

TL;DR: no, serverless is not a scam. But we still have some important questions to ask.

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I was recently reading an article by

Andrew Zuo

called . I often disagree with Mr. Zuo, but I like reading his articles anyway because they make me challenge my assumptions. Unfortunately, while this article indeed challenged my assumptions, it also rang some alarm bells for me. But I’ll get to that.

I first discovered serverless development in 2015. Over the past ten years I’ve spent half my time as a full-time serverless developer and the other half doing it part time. Between individual contribution, architecture design and leadership, I think it is fair to say that I am an experienced serverless practitioner.

Of course, I don’t think we can have an honest conversation about serverless without first defining it. I have heard the term “serverless” used on a lot of architectures, and I do not agree with many of them. For example, I don’t think your IBM mainframe is “serverless” just because it calls out to a third-party authentication service. For this article, I will be using the following definition:

A serverless application is an…