For me, serverless is not just "easy" scaling or a managed service, but completely automatic and elastic scaling with metered billing. If you can go from 1 to m

For me, serverless is not just "easy" scaling or a managed service, but completely automatic and elastic scaling with metered billing. If you can go from 1 to millions of requests without touching your infrastructure or dropping requests, then that's serverless. If you have to provision larger instances or even wait 10 minutes for your autoscaling policy to spin up new VMs so you can serve those requests, then it's not. Some services labelled serverless really do reach very close to this ideal (S3, for instance), while others fall short in various ways. "Serverless" Aurora, for example, can't scale writes beyond a single instance, so while it can take you quite far (a 96 core db instance can handle a lot of writes), past a certain point it's no longer really serverless anymore since you'll have to figure out some kind of sharding strategy to keep scaling writes. With S3 or DynamoDB, this doesn't happen. While even those services do have some sanity check limitations, they can scale seamlessly up to the point where you start to approach the scale of AWS itself.