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Also it fits in nicely with the other naming conventions such as the following:

- Software as a Service (SaaS) - a product such as GitHub or Slack

- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - VM or LB as you find in Azure or AWS or Digital Ocean

- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - sometimes called Container as a Service as you find in Heroku or Zeit Now

- Function as as Service (FaaS) - a single function as you find in Lambda

Technically CaaS could be IaaS, if you're just using containers as lightweight VM substitutes.

Practically CaaS tends to be PaaS, because the hosting service is also providing a platform such as Kubernetes.

What's the practical difference between FaaS and the old style mod_php, mod_perl, mod_python and friends ?

I think the difference is that you don’t know if the server is running Apache or nginx or IIS because it’s abstracted away.

The only interface is the input into the function and the output it returns.