Serverless platforms make it incredibly easy to deploy applications. You can take raw code, push it up to a service like AWS Lambda, and have a running application in just a few seconds. The serverless platform provider assumes responsibility for hosting and operating the platform, freeing you up to focus on your application. Naturally, this raises a question: if something goes wrong, who’s responsible?

The way the story goes is that in the old days Amazon used to cut power to data centers so they could see if their services were actually redundant across different data centers; and that they only abandoned this practice when EC2 customers started to complain (no matter how many times they were warned their instances might disappear without notice). This story may be apocryphal, but you don’t need to be worried about power loss outages in order to have a given data center go down.