I think the answer lies in your last paragraph, but your comment made me think: Perhaps Lambda functions are resilient because they're: - scope constrained -

I think the answer lies in your last paragraph, but your comment made me think: Perhaps Lambda functions are resilient because they're: - scope constrained - surrounded by APIs only (e.g. no cheating by having a whole POSIX system) - infrastructure is maintained solely by a giant company that you pay to not have to think about it I haven't used any "serverless" stuff, so I don't really know. Per the article's recommendation, I have noticed at work that resilient software is often a 400 line python script with no other dependencies; or, a medium sized piece of C++ infrastructure that depends only on the OS, the compiler, and a hand-written build system.