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Re:Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A by wpietri on Tuesday April 21, 2020 @11:44AM (#22935974)
I think there are legitimate use cases. E.g., I needed to help somebody with a little glue between Twilio and a SaaS tool. It was really nice to take a couple of functions, turn them into endpoints, and know that Amazon was going to worry about keeping them always available.

I agree it's so far wildly overblown, but I get that too. A lot of people are scared by ops, and "serverless" promises they don't have to think about it. For those of us comfortable with ops, even the name is an obvious lie. But for people who just have some code they want to run, getting it usefully deployed is still too hard.

Right now I feel like we're in a transitional era. The old model of individual single-purpose or multi-purpose servers is obviously inadequate. "Virtual server" is like "horseless carriage"; we know that the old paradigm is wrong, but we haven't found the new one. There are lots of contenders, but it seems like none of them have nailed it. The similar era for automobiles was circa 1900, where steam, electric, and internal combustion were all duking it out, with dozens of small manufacturers. I'll be very interested to see what we consolidate around.

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