5 ms·

What a ridiculous and strange definition this is. Its an architecture that relies on multiple, supposedly distributed services, all of which are hosted on serv

What a ridiculous and strange definition this is. Its an architecture that relies on multiple, supposedly distributed services, all of which are hosted on servers... Why not just call it "Multiserver" instead. If they mean "containerless servers" or "microservices", then why don't they say so? If they mean "distributed servers" why not call it that. If they mean that the client relies on multiple services (each hosted on different servers) why not just call it a thick/fat/stateful client? Even a database is a remote service (if not embedded), that is run on some sort of server. Calling anything serverless is just ridiculous as long as it depends on services on the network. This smells really bad of just another attempt at marketing a pointless definition just to get more business.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Illniyar 10y ago
No, the idea is simple - the servers are invisible to the user, he doesn't know what or how many are in use. Since the servers are completely abstracted away, they could have just as well not be - hence serverless. An analogy escapes me but I sure there are some.
- SNvD7vEJ 10y ago
  So it is about how the user perceives the application?! If so, why is it called "an architecture"? Or do you mean that the user don't have to care on how to configure the application? Then "Zero-configuration" is a better name. Or do you mean that the application hides that it use services on the net? Then it is even worse.
  - freyr 10y ago
    > So it is about how the user perceives the application The user here is the developer. Here's an explanation from the article: > "some amount of server-side logic is still written by the application developer but unlike traditional architectures is run in stateless compute containers that are event-triggered, ephemeral (may only last for one invocation), and fully managed by a 3rd party ... One way to think of this is Functions as a Service." FaaS is probably a better name.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  I also dislike the term serverless. It's confusing, doesn't relay the information it should. I can't suggest a good replacement, but it's painfully obvious that even here, most people commenting don't actually know what serverless means and what its implications are. Serverless really is an auto-scalable distributed infrastructure, perfect for small CPU-intensive tasks in an app which doesn't know how many CPUs it'll need at any one time.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  > they could have just as well not be That's a weird logical leap. Let's make the servers not be by unplugging them. How's the abstraction working now?
  - wpietri 10y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding. I read it as "they could just as well not be servers". It could be Diamond Age rod logic. It could be processing implemented on quantum foam. It could be gnomes. The point is that from the user's perspective, they no longer have to think about servers.
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      Sure, I get it. But we already have that idea. The whole idea of a server is to abstract away the details of the upstream computer and its software stack, so the user can think of it only as a provider of an abstract service. The irrelevance of their implementation as a host, VM, box, rack of boxes, pool of quantum foam, string and sparkles, is already built into the concept. We all know that there's no unique process that is http://amazon.com http://amazon.com. It's a service, provided by a (vast distributed) server.
      - wpietri 10y ago
        You use "server" to mean "a vast array of servers"? I don't think I've heard that before.
        robotresearcher 10y ago
        I'd say that http://amazon.com http://amazon.com is the address of Amazon's web server, yes. Does that sound wrong?
        wpietri 10y ago
        I don't think I have ever heard anybody use "server" to mean "lots of servers". Perhaps "web site" or "service" or "cluster" or even "load balancers" depending on whether they want to talk about what they provide or what does the providing.
LinuxBender 10y ago
I agree. Someone is still hosting the servers and services. It is just someone else. It is also just a re-spin of the term Application Service Provider. That term never gained popularity. There are some discussions of API's. Whether or not a service has an API is orthogonal to something being a hosted service.
dboreham 10y ago
In this context "server" doesn't mean "entity listening on some network endpoint, providing some service to network-connected clients" (which is I think the definition you're assuming). Instead "server" here means "Unix Machine". Thus "serverless" means software and humans writing and deploying said software that do not need to know anything about /etc/<whatever> and installing packages and disk partitioning and swapping and whether Python 2 or Python 3 gets installed by default this week and ... IMHO a good thing, mostly.
- bronson 10y ago
  So my car is engineless if I never look under the hood?
  - rileyphone 10y ago
    I think this architecture is public transportation in that analogy.
  - themihai 10y ago
    Maybe worry free if you don't need to look under the hood. If the manufacturer would lock the hood you would never know :)
    - dingaling 10y ago
      They actually did lock the hood with the Audi A1. Just had a flap through which you could top-up water and oil. Perhaps we could adopt 'A1' instead of the confusing term 'serverless'...
  - bobbyi_settv 10y ago
    Your car isn't engineless because when its engine dies, you will know about it and have to do something. S3 is serverless because if one of the servers storing my files die, I have no way of even knowing it happened.
    - 10y ago
sergiosgc 10y ago
I agree. It is preempting definition use from a true serverless architecture: a swarm of symmetrical client/servers that implement an application and distributively store application state.
themihai 10y ago
I think it's basically a stateless PaaS/microservice with a set of constrains/APIs on top. The BaaS/Serveless architectures also seem to have their own sub-categories based on the constrains/target. Some are fat(i.e. a kind of full blown PaaS with a common/advanced API gateway on top like parse.com) and others are lightweight(i.e. amazon lambda) meant to run as a function(e.g. update a record on event changes). In the end they are various abstractions that hopefully will improve the security and help you to manage your infrastructure easier.
matthewaveryusa 10y ago
I think Fowler tends to do this in general. Here's a comment from 2 years ago I posted along the same lines: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2051mx/microservices/cg03hkf https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2051mx/microse... (And yes, 2 years ago I was a little more violent with my wording. Time has taught me things.)
- freyr 10y ago
  This article wasn't written by Fowler.
hughw 10y ago
Now that it has a name, it can develop a hierarchy of experts, annual conferences, and a consultancy bonanza for a few years.
mattbillenstein 10y ago
You're missing the point in that _you_ don't have servers. Just as cloud is "someone else's computer" -- serverless is someone else's server.
- Can_Not 10y ago
  He's not missing the point. He might have a preference that technical terms have semantically useful meanings.
- kowdermeister 10y ago
  That's true for all types of cloud providers, but we don't call them serverless. This is marketing bullshit for microservice architecture. It just sounds better with some added philosophy.
ben_jones 10y ago
I imagine serverless is a powerful buzzword because it implies cost savings on servers.
adamt 10y ago
The phrase that Amazon used when launching lambda was 'deploy code not servers'. To me this sums up what 'serverless' means. It means the developer doesn't have to worry about servers in any way. With AWS Lambda/API Gateway (and arguably with Google App Engine before it) you take away the toil of having to: * Manage/deploy servers * Monitor/maintain/upgrade servers * Figuring out tools to deploy your app to your server * Scaling an app globally. * Coping with outages in a data-centre/availability * Worry about load-balancing & scaling infrastructure So obviously there are still servers there, but they are largely invisible to the developer. I think this is more than just a marketing gimmick. It is part of a big change in application architectures. At one end as a small developer of of web/mobile app this can considerably reduce the amount of code/maintenance you need. At the opposite end of the spectrum the likes of Google (Borg) and Facebook (Tupperware) have developed their own in-house solutions where by servers are largely abstracted out as an entity that developers need to worry about. Managed docker services (e.g. Google Container Platform, Docker Cloud) are another approach of achieving a largely 'serverless' goal. (edits for formatting)
- sergiosgc 10y ago
  > So obviously there are still servers there, but they are largely invisible to the developer. This would only be true if the abstraction were not leaky. Frankly, upon a very cursory inspection, my opinion is that AWS Lambda leaks like a sieve.
- fauigerzigerk 10y ago
  I would call that a deployment strategy, not an application architecture.
  - ronreiter 10y ago
    No! That's EXACTLY the point - this is EXACTLY what it isn't - a deployment strategy. Docker vs Ansible is a deployment strategy. Relying on others to make your code run on a server is VERY different than doing it yourself. It's practically the difference between a company with a DevOps team and one without it.
audleman 10y ago
As a DevOps guy the definition makes sense to me. I've got several parts of my operation that require me to spin up 3 - 30 instances to handle parallel load. I'm always monitoring queues to see if I'm scaling correctly. If I went 'Serverless' Amazon would handle that whole chunk for me. That's approximately 20% of my job taken care of. I think to an end-user the definition is meaningless, but to its intended audience it fits.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Illniyar 10y ago

No, the idea is simple - the servers are invisible to the user, he doesn't know what or how many are in use. Since the servers are completely abstracted away, they could have just as well not be - hence serverless. An analogy escapes me but I sure there are some.

SNvD7vEJ 10y ago
So it is about how the user perceives the application?! If so, why is it called "an architecture"? Or do you mean that the user don't have to care on how to configure the application? Then "Zero-configuration" is a better name. Or do you mean that the application hides that it use services on the net? Then it is even worse.
- freyr 10y ago
  > So it is about how the user perceives the application The user here is the developer. Here's an explanation from the article: > "some amount of server-side logic is still written by the application developer but unlike traditional architectures is run in stateless compute containers that are event-triggered, ephemeral (may only last for one invocation), and fully managed by a 3rd party ... One way to think of this is Functions as a Service." FaaS is probably a better name.
scrollaway 10y ago
I also dislike the term serverless. It's confusing, doesn't relay the information it should. I can't suggest a good replacement, but it's painfully obvious that even here, most people commenting don't actually know what serverless means and what its implications are. Serverless really is an auto-scalable distributed infrastructure, perfect for small CPU-intensive tasks in an app which doesn't know how many CPUs it'll need at any one time.
robotresearcher 10y ago
> they could have just as well not be That's a weird logical leap. Let's make the servers not be by unplugging them. How's the abstraction working now?
- wpietri 10y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding. I read it as "they could just as well not be servers". It could be Diamond Age rod logic. It could be processing implemented on quantum foam. It could be gnomes. The point is that from the user's perspective, they no longer have to think about servers.
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    Sure, I get it. But we already have that idea. The whole idea of a server is to abstract away the details of the upstream computer and its software stack, so the user can think of it only as a provider of an abstract service. The irrelevance of their implementation as a host, VM, box, rack of boxes, pool of quantum foam, string and sparkles, is already built into the concept. We all know that there's no unique process that is http://amazon.com http://amazon.com. It's a service, provided by a (vast distributed) server.
    - wpietri 10y ago
      You use "server" to mean "a vast array of servers"? I don't think I've heard that before.
      - robotresearcher 10y ago
        I'd say that http://amazon.com http://amazon.com is the address of Amazon's web server, yes. Does that sound wrong?
        wpietri 10y ago
        I don't think I have ever heard anybody use "server" to mean "lots of servers". Perhaps "web site" or "service" or "cluster" or even "load balancers" depending on whether they want to talk about what they provide or what does the providing.

LinuxBender 10y ago

I agree. Someone is still hosting the servers and services. It is just someone else. It is also just a re-spin of the term Application Service Provider. That term never gained popularity. There are some discussions of API's. Whether or not a service has an API is orthogonal to something being a hosted service.

dboreham 10y ago

In this context "server" doesn't mean "entity listening on some network endpoint, providing some service to network-connected clients" (which is I think the definition you're assuming). Instead "server" here means "Unix Machine". Thus "serverless" means software and humans writing and deploying said software that do not need to know anything about /etc/<whatever> and installing packages and disk partitioning and swapping and whether Python 2 or Python 3 gets installed by default this week and ... IMHO a good thing, mostly.

bronson 10y ago
So my car is engineless if I never look under the hood?
- rileyphone 10y ago
  I think this architecture is public transportation in that analogy.
- themihai 10y ago
  Maybe worry free if you don't need to look under the hood. If the manufacturer would lock the hood you would never know :)
  - dingaling 10y ago
    They actually did lock the hood with the Audi A1. Just had a flap through which you could top-up water and oil. Perhaps we could adopt 'A1' instead of the confusing term 'serverless'...
- bobbyi_settv 10y ago
  Your car isn't engineless because when its engine dies, you will know about it and have to do something. S3 is serverless because if one of the servers storing my files die, I have no way of even knowing it happened.
  - 10y ago

sergiosgc 10y ago

I agree. It is preempting definition use from a true serverless architecture: a swarm of symmetrical client/servers that implement an application and distributively store application state.

themihai 10y ago

I think it's basically a stateless PaaS/microservice with a set of constrains/APIs on top. The BaaS/Serveless architectures also seem to have their own sub-categories based on the constrains/target. Some are fat(i.e. a kind of full blown PaaS with a common/advanced API gateway on top like parse.com) and others are lightweight(i.e. amazon lambda) meant to run as a function(e.g. update a record on event changes). In the end they are various abstractions that hopefully will improve the security and help you to manage your infrastructure easier.

matthewaveryusa 10y ago

I think Fowler tends to do this in general. Here's a comment from 2 years ago I posted along the same lines: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2051mx/microservices/cg03hkf https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2051mx/microse... (And yes, 2 years ago I was a little more violent with my wording. Time has taught me things.)

freyr 10y ago
This article wasn't written by Fowler.

hughw 10y ago

Now that it has a name, it can develop a hierarchy of experts, annual conferences, and a consultancy bonanza for a few years.

mattbillenstein 10y ago

You're missing the point in that _you_ don't have servers. Just as cloud is "someone else's computer" -- serverless is someone else's server.

Can_Not 10y ago
He's not missing the point. He might have a preference that technical terms have semantically useful meanings.
kowdermeister 10y ago
That's true for all types of cloud providers, but we don't call them serverless. This is marketing bullshit for microservice architecture. It just sounds better with some added philosophy.

ben_jones 10y ago

I imagine serverless is a powerful buzzword because it implies cost savings on servers.

adamt 10y ago

The phrase that Amazon used when launching lambda was 'deploy code not servers'. To me this sums up what 'serverless' means. It means the developer doesn't have to worry about servers in any way. With AWS Lambda/API Gateway (and arguably with Google App Engine before it) you take away the toil of having to: * Manage/deploy servers * Monitor/maintain/upgrade servers * Figuring out tools to deploy your app to your server * Scaling an app globally. * Coping with outages in a data-centre/availability * Worry about load-balancing & scaling infrastructure So obviously there are still servers there, but they are largely invisible to the developer. I think this is more than just a marketing gimmick. It is part of a big change in application architectures. At one end as a small developer of of web/mobile app this can considerably reduce the amount of code/maintenance you need. At the opposite end of the spectrum the likes of Google (Borg) and Facebook (Tupperware) have developed their own in-house solutions where by servers are largely abstracted out as an entity that developers need to worry about. Managed docker services (e.g. Google Container Platform, Docker Cloud) are another approach of achieving a largely 'serverless' goal. (edits for formatting)

sergiosgc 10y ago
> So obviously there are still servers there, but they are largely invisible to the developer. This would only be true if the abstraction were not leaky. Frankly, upon a very cursory inspection, my opinion is that AWS Lambda leaks like a sieve.
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
I would call that a deployment strategy, not an application architecture.
- ronreiter 10y ago
  No! That's EXACTLY the point - this is EXACTLY what it isn't - a deployment strategy. Docker vs Ansible is a deployment strategy. Relying on others to make your code run on a server is VERY different than doing it yourself. It's practically the difference between a company with a DevOps team and one without it.

audleman 10y ago

As a DevOps guy the definition makes sense to me. I've got several parts of my operation that require me to spin up 3 - 30 instances to handle parallel load. I'm always monitoring queues to see if I'm scaling correctly. If I went 'Serverless' Amazon would handle that whole chunk for me. That's approximately 20% of my job taken care of. I think to an end-user the definition is meaningless, but to its intended audience it fits.