jeremylikness

Serverless is identical in every respect to traditional hosting/managed services with one exception: micro-billing. In web hosting you are often either constrained by the "level" you pay for, or have to configure scale and pay for the size of your domain. True serverless should auto-scale on demand without your intervention, and it should only bill you for what you use. Have a slow month and are idle? Pennies. Have a phenomenal month and huge usage? Dollars. There is less server, not no server, but instead of worrying about the OS or even platform level dependencies, you can focus just on the bit of code you want to run. If your server is a house and a virtual machine is like renting a house, platform-as-a-service is an apartment and serverless is a hotel (thanks to Scott Hanselman for that analogy).

.NET Standard is an interface. It describes a specification that must be met. .NET Framework, Xamarin, UWP and .NET Core are implementations. Both have APIs that are specific to the implementation (for example, .NET Framework has APIs that are specific to Window, while .NET Core is cross-platform and doesn't have them, and Xamarin has mobile-specific APIs that don't make sense on desktop). At a minimum they both implement the APIs designated by the .NET Standard specification. It is a guideline for you to write libraries that can be shared anywhere without recompilation.