In my book, the innovation in Lambda is, above everything else, about the billing model. My company moved the work of 40 dedicated servers onto Lambda and in doing so decimated our costs. Paying for 1500 cores (our current AWS limit) in 100ms increments has been a game changer.
I'm sure there are upsides to adopting the same programming model with your own hardware or VMs, but the financial benefit of Lambda will not be there.
I'm sure there are upsides to adopting the same programming model with your own hardware or VMs, but the financial benefit of Lambda will not be there.