> perhaps serverless computing is inefficient today but it could help improve hardware utilization. This was a big selling point of virtualization, originally.

> perhaps serverless computing is inefficient today but it could help improve hardware utilization. This was a big selling point of virtualization, originally. It was certainly true for environments that suffered from poor utilization due to, say, running one app per (often oversized and/or antiquated) physical servers, as I believe was common for enterprise IT shops. Whether this improvement could have been achieved by other technical means (at least in non-Windows environments) is debatable. It's also unclear what percentage of total hardware utilization enterprise IT accounted for back then, and I suspect it was much higher than today. For other environments, where virtualization would replace simple Unix time-sharing, it stands to reason that hardware utilization had to go up, if only moderately. Interestingly, enterprise IT practices are still so extremely expensive today that moving to a cloud provider is obviously cheaper for them.