It's a pretty fluid term (and maybe fading from use except in the 1st gen stuff?) and different implementations have different strengths and weaknesses. I think

It's a pretty fluid term (and maybe fading from use except in the 1st gen stuff?) and different implementations have different strengths and weaknesses. I think something developer friendly and high level like fly.io, Cloud Run, etc will be a sweet spot. The usage of the term is even further muddied by its usage to describe some SaaS APIs, like AWS calls DynamoDB a serverless database. Maybe Google Sheets will be called a serverless spreadsheet next. About AWS Lambda specifically, it's a pretty low level building block for web facing cases, using it directly makes you spend a lot of time in web -> lambda wiring using API Gateway, authentication, juggling either the anachronistic zip files for deployment or dealing with all the container registry & container CICD logistics, setting up a lot of fine grained authorization IAM roles, trust relationships, etc, all the aws provided monitoring and logging stuff necessitated to troubleshoot all that, and the infra-as-code for all of the above which is tedious but necessary to keep any kind of sanity in managing the complexity. But in the running costs it does save you a few bucks of per month compared to the overpriced always-on EC2 stuff in AWS especially if your service is low volume, or high volume with spiky load.