Why the ‘WHY’ matters more than the ‘WHAT’ in Serverless!

It is indeed time to change gears. Even after six years since we first witnessed lambda function, and many years benefiting from managed (serverless) services, we are repeatedly getting stuck and falling back into the same cycle of defining serverless with the ever so popular and mundane question of ‘What is serverless?’.

Definition overload

For me, it is getting to the tipping point of hearing the same thing over and over again. There is plentiful, handful, earful, mouthful and over spilled definitions of serverless all around us. Often we spend awful lot of time perfecting (and arguing on) the definition of serverless than producing something that is beneficial to our customers and valuable to our business stakeholders.

For anyone who is still searching for a definition for serverless, then there are many around in different shapes and forms — one word version, one liner version, paragraph version and even a full page version.

Whether serverless is a doctrine, enigma, dogma, direction, destination, religion or whatever we fantasise, it simply does not bring any value until we put that into practice. Hence we must not waste our energy by perfecting its definition but must cultivate its value by adopting it. The moment we shift our focus to look at the ‘why’…