IDG Contributor Network: Back to the future: It's all about appliances again
There are two fascinating and completely contradictory trends going on in the infrastructure space. On the one hand, we have the rise of so called "server-less infrastructures," the event-driven approach, first introduced by Amazon Web Services with its Lambda offering and since emulated by a number of public cloud providers (Google, IBM and Amazon for a start) as well as a number of initiatives.
The idea of these event-driven approaches is that processes sit idle, essentially doing nothing until a particular event occurs, at which time a process kicks off. Once that process is complete, the function shuts down and goes back into its vegetative state. The promise of these event-driven approaches is pretty exciting: All of a sudden developers and operations teams don't need to think about servers, and can instead focus on the stuff that matters -- building cool applications.
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