But, the thing is so much code is removed in serverless. I'm not saying cloud providers aren't fighting to lock you in. It is just so much easier to switch if you have 1% of the code you used to.
What code gets eliminated in serverless? I have historically done most of my http backends using things like Flask or Sinatra or Elixir or Go (with net/http), and I’ve never felt like there’s a whole lot of code to begin with. What am I missing (if you don’t mind elaborating)?
You’re always for all practical purposes locked into your infrastructure once your business grows.
Compare this to a large application where you are marshalling objects from the HTTP POST request into temp objects inside your application language. Making that work with all clients, within all server contexts, is a lot of code which I hated to write.
With serverless, I'm never connecting my clients or backends directly. I'm thinking in terms of moving high level objects (JSON, files, events) between systems, and Google provides the glue to wire those together. It takes a mind shift, but when you realize how much glue code you are writing and that you can forget, it makes your application layer really simple.
The downside is that you then need to call them via Lambda instead of using some kind of REST API -- however at least in my case, this turns out to be the much lesser evil as I'm only using them internally, and have my own code that makes the calls. My "lock in" is that I would have to change that code, but it's trivial.