After reading through all of this I'm like ... "Yep, that's cgi" For the not-yet-old farts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface https://en.

After reading through all of this I'm like ... "Yep, that's cgi" For the not-yet-old farts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface (Note CGI capable accounts are still available for WAY cheaper than on Amazon at a great many hosters) (And no, the program is not restarted every request: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCGI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCGI ) (You can even get ones that "autoscale" because the load is sharded on the hosters side, meaning the CGI will start up on a number of different servers - can be pretty high - when required, and only when required) Implementations for pretty much every language are available. Serverless does, of course, mean WAY less efficient (but you're charged for that by Amazon, so that's a plus, not a minus for cloud providers), far less language implementations than cgi, less support, closed source, much bigger memory usage, ...