I'm cautiously optimistic that the vendor lock-in will fade away over time. Hopefully open source frameworks can provide a jQuery-like abstraction layer over all of the vendor-specific implementation details. Of course, there are lots of challenges when you start getting into deeper architectures - queues triggering layers of lambdas interacting with various caches and data stores. But I we'll see best practices emerge that help people keep things simple and flexible.
For testing it should be possible to run everything in a mock vendor system on your local machine - not that such a system exists today, but theoretically it could.
Overall, my sense is that Serverless architectures will never be useful for everyone. They'll always be better for smaller, simpler systems that don't see tons of traffic. The Serverless community should focus on these use cases. The thing is, there are tons and tons of apps that are over served by all the flexibility EC2 provides. And there is another set of unborn apps that haven't been created only because the barrier to setting up and managing the backend was a _little_ too high. I'm really excited to see serverless bring these apps to life.
I actually think the opposite. Serverless architectures are the future for most of the app servers that need a language agnostic API. Maybe I didn't get it right but to me BaaS is just a PaaS with a common API interface(i.e. authentication, input/output serialization, cache etc).
There's a pragmatic definition buried in the article... if you can't spin up your app in 20ms and run it for half a second effectively, it's PaaS, not serverless.
For testing it should be possible to run everything in a mock vendor system on your local machine - not that such a system exists today, but theoretically it could.
Overall, my sense is that Serverless architectures will never be useful for everyone. They'll always be better for smaller, simpler systems that don't see tons of traffic. The Serverless community should focus on these use cases. The thing is, there are tons and tons of apps that are over served by all the flexibility EC2 provides. And there is another set of unborn apps that haven't been created only because the barrier to setting up and managing the backend was a _little_ too high. I'm really excited to see serverless bring these apps to life.