I don't know. What he's describing sounds very close to what I've been working on, all AWS Serverless with lambdas and SQS and DynamoDB, with config (CloudFormation) via code in BitBucket. I can launch a new lambda in less than a minute with a couple of aws-sam-cli commands, and get responses from curl in less than 2ms.

I mean, nothing's perfect, but AWS Serverless seems to be the closest thing I've ever seen to truly abstracting away everything but the actual code.