AWS Lambda and serverless architecture

Today at Zalando we had an external guest - Brian J Wagner, a Solutions Architect at AWS. Thanks a lot Brian!

I've really understood why Lambda is a really next generation approach to cloud computing and what it brings to the table. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a history for me looks like following. 

At the beginning, when a developer wrote a code, he had to fully manage his computer, where the code was executed.  With time people noticed, that it would be much more effective to have a separate person to write code and to execute it and it would be nice to have them as separate teams. That's why data centers  appeared, where one could rent a server and get his code running. The next step was to notice, that a lot of use cases didn't need to have the same amount of servers all the time and it would be much cheaper to start server, when one really needed it, and stop, when the server was not needed anymore. This model is called a cloud computing. But you still have an overhead of asking to create needed type of EC2 instance, stopping it, monitoring it... But what one really need from hosting is to execute his code and not really care about all those instances. 

Lambda is a completely new approach - serverless architecture. It can do almost the same, what a usual EC2 instance can, but you don't care about instance types and stopping those instances. You can concentrate on writing code. The rest will be managed by AWS. And one important point is that, Lambda can save money for users, because a user won't need to pay for a EC2 instance, when it has no traffic. For Lambda you pay only, when you use it(really executing some useful code and not just waiting for a next request). With Lambda one can forget about servers and let AWS manage them.