In the previous section, we were reminded of the progression of building data centers to consuming cloud resources. We can also relate this shift to how we provision, deploy, and scale our compute resources. Let's have a look at how our thinking has moved from deploying physical servers to scaling our applications and to scaling at an application function level:
- Physical servers: Scale at the physical server layer
- Virtual machines: Density efficiencies achieved by virtualizing the hardware
- Containers: Better density with faster start times
- Functions: Best density by abstracting the runtime
