Serverless architecture is often described in broad, enthusiastic terms. That tends to create two unhelpful reactions: overuse by teams chasing elegance, and underuse by teams that only associate serverless with trivial event handlers.
The better way to think about serverless on Azure is through fit. It is most valuable when workloads are variable, event-driven, integration-heavy, or easier to manage as reactive units rather than continuously running services. It is also useful where operational simplicity and elasticity matter more than deep control over long-lived runtime behavior.
Where teams go wrong is using serverless to avoid architectural decisions they still need to make. Event design, error handling, orchestration boundaries, observability, and idempotency do not disappear simply because infrastructure is abstracted.
Used well, serverless can accelerate delivery and reduce platform friction. Used carelessly, it can distribute complexity into places that are harder to reason about.
The right question is not whether serverless is modern. It is whether the workload gains meaningful operating advantages from the model. That is where the decision becomes clearer.
