Earlier this week I spent a day following the serverless track at the AWS dev day in San Francisco. I guess serverless is the "new thing" in "the cloud". By building a serverless service you build a service using an infra structure where you don't care about servers, virtual machines or containers but rather functional units.
That is, you implement your service as a set of functions that each can be updated and scaled independently. And most importantly the scaling happens automagically and you only pay for time you actually execute.
Apart from the scaling benefits I see great potential in simplifying development and management of services as all the boilerplate stuff you usually need is stripped away and you can focus on pure functionality. A lot of systems I've seen are actually implemented using a pattern well suitable for a serverless implementation. They just had to implement a lot of stuff that in this new world is no longer needed.
Amazon is definitly (IMHO) the leader today with its Lambda offering, but Microsoft and Google are catching up. All current offerings target event based work flows which is interesting as almost every workflow I can think of is event driven either based on time or user/device action... So there should be no problem implement almost anything on a serverless platform without too much effort.
I'm really looking forward to work more with this pattern.