> Why is the alternative to serverless, colocating servers in a DC? Because that’s what the author was comparing it to. Yes you can rent vms, and that works fo

> Why is the alternative to serverless, colocating servers in a DC? Because that’s what the author was comparing it to. Yes you can rent vms, and that works for many workloads. However serverless platforms provide other benefits like deployments, load balancing, and auto scaling that you’d need to setup yourself on raw vms. Plus, with services like AppEngine Flex you can run serverless on vms to cut costs if you have consistent traffic. > Per request pricing and "scaling to zero" is just old fashioned unbundling. You are selling a smaller quantity of a product at a higher unit price and putting a bit of lipstick on that pig to convince people they are not getting hosed. It really depends on your problem. Sometimes you might have a very low QPS service (like maybe a few QPH) and running a whole vm would be overkill. Some business have really bursty traffic and maybe some regions won’t get any traffic at all during the night but they still want to deliver low latency service to the people living on that side of the globe. Additionally, these are just reasons to serverless for scale to zero and ignores other benefits, like reduced operational costs, that business can use to justify paying more for compute time. There are lots of reasons to use and not use serverless for compute. I don’t think it is the solution for everyone and everything, but I do think the hate and FUD directed towards it is unwarranted and uniformed. Disclaimer: I work for Google, opinions are my own Edit: typos and disclaimer