We used to have some specific problems…
- "We’re expecting requests per second to fluctuate between 2 and 30,000."
- Oops, we put the wrong instance in the load balancer.
- Oops, beanstalk crapped its pants.
But in 2015, we discovered AWS Lambda and it changed the frame of reference for a lot of problems.
We went from bare metal, to VPS setups, to Platform as a Service (Heroku), to containers (Docker), to FaaS – Function as a Service, currently best represented by AWS Lambda.