* We don't monitor how many instances are running and don't really care. Our "functions" are http endpoints. GAE spins up or down instances to meet the load. Our interface with "instances" is just the size of the bill at the end of the month.
* Async task processing is also just an http endpoint function. We even have a little bit of syntactic sugar so it looks like we're just adding functions to a queue.
* We have no ops or devops staff. We just deploy code that implements functions (http endpoints).
* Persistence is also scaled by Google; there's no database server, just an API to read/write data that scales infinitely (or at least, scales with linearly our bill, not limited by the dataset).
It sounds to me like the article is trying to distinguish between "serverless" and PaaS by describing PaaS done poorly. For the longest time, GAE didn't even expose the # of instances servicing your app. They've exposed a lot more of the underlying constructs since, but you can still ignore them unless you're trying to hyperoptimize your bill.