What if we hosted the cloud... on our own computers?

I see we have entered that phase in the ebb and flow of cloud vs. self-hosting. I'm seeing lots of echoes of this everywhere, epitomised by talks like this:

https://youtu.be/tWz4Eqh9USc

It won't be a... cloud?

To me, the principal differentiator is the elasticity. I start and retire instances according to my needs, and only pay for the resources I've actually consumed. This is only possible on a very large shared pool of resources, where spikes of use even out somehow.

If I host everything myself, the cloud-like deployment tools simplify my life, but I still pay the full price for my rented / colocated server. This makes sense when my load is reasonably even and predictable. This also makes sense when it's my home NAS or media server anyway.

(It is similar to using a bus vs owning a van.)

> What if we hosted the cloud... on our own computers?

The value proposition of function-as-a-service offerings is not "cloud" buzzwords, but providing an event-handling framework where developers can focus on implementing event handlers that are triggered by specific events.

FaaS frameworks are the high-level counterpart of the low-pevel message brokers+web services/background tasks.

Once you include queues in the list of primitives, durable executions are another step in that direction.

If you have any experience developing and maintaining web services, you'll understand that API work is largely comprised of writing boilerplate code, controller actions, and background tasks. FaaS frameworks abstract away the boilerplate work.