But as soon as you have Docker involved, you have reintroduced much of the complexity you had running vanilla VMs anyway. Serverless is then little more than an

But as soon as you have Docker involved, you have reintroduced much of the complexity you had running vanilla VMs anyway. Serverless is then little more than an economic decision, something that might be a bit cheaper than maintaining a full-time VM to do whatever it is you're doing, as long as you can tolerate the code start penalty (which is typically greater when using Docker). The main value in serverless, to me at least, is in the ability to write only the actual functionality you need and not care about setting up any run-time environment or setting up a substantial build process to make artefacts to support the run-time environment. With something like AWS Lambda, you can literally just copy and paste some function in any of several programming languages into a box on the dashboard, set a couple of details for security etc, and make it live.