Totally stateless PHP apps (retrieving and storing state at the top and bottom of each request) plus autoscaling based on CPU load starts to look pretty close to Lambdas + scheduled tasks to keep them "warm". This is how most LAMP apps are/were built, notably Wordpress.

The real pain point in any auto-scaling/cloud/serverless application is and will probably always be the stateful bits. I think the first cloud provider to really figure out this killer bit will be the ultimate winner of the cloud wars. It will probably look something like Amazon's "Aurora Serverless" but be even more frictionless.

> Does PHP automatically scale infrastructure to meet demand? Can you bring up 1000 instances of your service for spikes in volume? And then scale back down when the spike is over? Without writing code?

People talk about this a lot. I wonder, for what percentage of systems, this kind of scalability is really a requirement. I also wonder what percentage of devs work on these kind of systems.

That's why I made http://bigcgi.com. It's just CGI behind a reverse proxy that handles file sync between hosts. My blog runs on it.