Infrastructure patterns are constantly evolving.

1. Through the 1980s, mainframes were the center of gravity for all business processes.
2. Servers became smaller and more specialized throughout the 1990s.
3. A majority of new servers were virtualized in the 2000s.
4. In the 2010s, the bulk of new virtual machines are being spun up in the cloud.
5. Now, we’re witnessing a shift from entire virtual machines to efficient virtualized “containers”.

Throughout all of this, the scope of solutions has become more granular and purpose-built. No matter what, we’ve always had a level of infrastructure to worry about. Whether managing the monolithic servers or orchestrating a fleet of microservices, there have always been performance, scalability, security, and costs to optimize.

Now, companies are starting to adopt the “serverless” computing pattern, which foregoes most infrastructure concerns. Similar to how Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is significantly easier to maintain than classic capex infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is even easier to maintain than IaaS, “serverless” computing is the easiest of all to maintain.