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We don't choose the buzzwords - the market (or marketing people) do so. The word has already been chosen - "serverless". I agree there could have been a better

We don't choose the buzzwords - the market (or marketing people) do so. The word has already been chosen - "serverless". I agree there could have been a better word that didn't clash with our knowledge that there are still servers involved.

inopinatus 11y ago
It's a straw man to assume that "serverless" refers to physical servers. The argument is triggering my irony detector, since that usage is itself a marketing category so broad as to be meaningless. Only in the client-server model does "server" have a definition worth reasoning about, where "server" refers to the passive listening endpoint in that model. Lambda's published reference architecture is asynchronous invocation via queues listening to pub/sub events, which in integration terms is the antithesis of the client-server model. There is no listening server in the client-server sense. So whilst the term "serverless" has obviously been chosen as a catchy marketing term for the mouthful that is "asynchronous event-driven self-scaling platform-as-a-service", it's not wrong.
stephenr 11y ago
After someone posted links, I went and did 30 seconds of cursory reading. The three referenced pages are: Server-less conf - a conference about building apps on AWS lambda Serverless blog - a blog about building apps on AWS lambda Serverless framework - a framework for building apps on AWS lambda. Every single "server-less" thing I can find, comes back to "using AWS Lambda". Which then makes me wonder why the need for a buzzword like "Server-less" - it's not like it's trying to describe a range of approaches and technologies (like say Web 2.0 was doing). Ohhh of course. How stupid of me. It's deliberately vague and non-specific. You can sell a client on "we use a server-less architecture" because they think it means literally that - no servers, just computer guy magic. Is it as easy to sell a client on "we built the app to rely completely on 5 different services from a single company that has a history of anti-competitive behaviour"? I doubt it.
- intrasight 11y ago
  I see it all the time now when referring to Lambda or Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions. I'd claim, in fact, that there is no other one buzzword which is currently used.

inopinatus 11y ago

It's a straw man to assume that "serverless" refers to physical servers. The argument is triggering my irony detector, since that usage is itself a marketing category so broad as to be meaningless. Only in the client-server model does "server" have a definition worth reasoning about, where "server" refers to the passive listening endpoint in that model. Lambda's published reference architecture is asynchronous invocation via queues listening to pub/sub events, which in integration terms is the antithesis of the client-server model. There is no listening server in the client-server sense. So whilst the term "serverless" has obviously been chosen as a catchy marketing term for the mouthful that is "asynchronous event-driven self-scaling platform-as-a-service", it's not wrong.

stephenr 11y ago

After someone posted links, I went and did 30 seconds of cursory reading. The three referenced pages are: Server-less conf - a conference about building apps on AWS lambda Serverless blog - a blog about building apps on AWS lambda Serverless framework - a framework for building apps on AWS lambda. Every single "server-less" thing I can find, comes back to "using AWS Lambda". Which then makes me wonder why the need for a buzzword like "Server-less" - it's not like it's trying to describe a range of approaches and technologies (like say Web 2.0 was doing). Ohhh of course. How stupid of me. It's deliberately vague and non-specific. You can sell a client on "we use a server-less architecture" because they think it means literally that - no servers, just computer guy magic. Is it as easy to sell a client on "we built the app to rely completely on 5 different services from a single company that has a history of anti-competitive behaviour"? I doubt it.

intrasight 11y ago
I see it all the time now when referring to Lambda or Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions. I'd claim, in fact, that there is no other one buzzword which is currently used.