The big difference with something like PL/SQL is that it’s a proprietary language, whereas lambda and the other faas options are based on open languages. Makes portability somewhat easier to achieve.
For sure; the external interface of a lambda is trivial, that is, a single entrypoint function with an 'event'. It's relatively easy to create a simple wrapper around that to make it either provider agnostic or self-hosted.
I haven't used lambda but it sounds remarkably similar to a Django function.
In Django urls point to a function. Your request matches that url, that function gets run.
Lambda must have some similar sort of mapping of urls to functions, so what exactly are you saving with it? Ok, Django includes an ORM, but if you are using any sort of persistence you will need a database layer as well.
Can someone explain what all the fuss is about or what I am missing?
If you're dealing purely with web requests, then yeah, API Gateway + Lambda sounds pretty similar to a Django function. But having used both, it's a lot easier and faster to setup API GW and Lambda than it is a Django app.
And if you're not dealing with purely web requests, then they're very different. Most of my lambdas trigger off of Kinesis, SNS, and SQS events. Work gets sent to these queues/notification endpoints, and then the Lambda function does work based off the data received there, and scales to handle the amount of data automatically.
