> What if we hosted the cloud... on our own computers?

The value proposition of function-as-a-service offerings is not "cloud" buzzwords, but providing an event-handling framework where developers can focus on implementing event handlers that are triggered by specific events.

FaaS frameworks are the high-level counterpart of the low-pevel message brokers+web services/background tasks.

Once you include queues in the list of primitives, durable executions are another step in that direction.

If you have any experience developing and maintaining web services, you'll understand that API work is largely comprised of writing boilerplate code, controller actions, and background tasks. FaaS frameworks abstract away the boilerplate work.