Intuitively, the popularisation of FaaS feels inevitable as lower level technical challenges get solved and give way to abstractions like this. Who knows though what our stack will look like in 20 years.
Looking behind what I have seen since I started paying attention in the 1980's, as it looks today, resold under new marketing terms, resold by newly founded startups that are disrupting the ecosystem.
I agree, FaaS is treading deep "CGI" territory, except there are a lot more resources available for nice to have operational overheads so people think it's largely different.
As Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed". And in IT, sometimes the future takes a long nap. I wouldn't be too surprised if e.g. descendants of Linda spaces get re-discovered because external circumstances favor that model.
Although with FaaS, I don't see anything particularly new from a development perspective. It's, well, functions. Most of the time they aren't communicating in any kind of novel way, and often they're doing the decade-old stuff of reading files and slurping databases. The abstraction being more on the operational side of things this time.
Not that I'm complaining or doing the "it's just CGI" dance. Compared to other "cloudy" tech, there's actually potential for simplifying things and not just simulated VAX computers with more effort…
