Almost all of what cloud providers offer can be accomplished using plain old VMs, yet people find it useful to pay for higher-level abstractions. The whole serv

Almost all of what cloud providers offer can be accomplished using plain old VMs, yet people find it useful to pay for higher-level abstractions. The whole serverless thing is arguably a return to the mainframe model: managed black-box platform that takes care of replication, failover, storage, etc. and lets you write code that's relatively naive about distributed systems. A mainframe is just a distributed system in a box, presenting similarly simplified APIs.