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"serverless" is a new term that people have been using in tons of different ways. To the author, frankly I don't think you get to say what's serverless and what

by pbiggar 10y ago

"serverless" is a new term that people have been using in tons of different ways. To the author, frankly I don't think you get to say what's serverless and what isn't. I think only point 1 is agreed upon - the rest is up in the air. Point 3: that it must be function-as-a-service: I dont agree there. Counter-point: if your backend is google sheets, or plain S3, it's certainly serverless. Docker? Maybe. Depends how it's architected. I get that they're trying to latch onto the up-and-coming big movement, but since that big term has no definition, they have as much right as the author to claim to belong to it.

nzoschke 10y ago
Strongly agree "serverless" is not well defined in general. > Reducing maintenance by not running your own platform This is my favorite technique too but it's nothing new. Heroku, App Engine and Lambda satisfy this for custom code. But I do agree with the author. Docker is not a service or serverless. Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos are all software in every sense. You install them on servers and you perform complex operations to keep them running well. Doing this unlocks all sorts of new utility, but it's the opposite of "use cloud services" in almost every way.
falcolas 10y ago
> if your backend is [...] S3, it's certainly serverless Is it really serverless if you have to configure the web server serving the files? If you have to manage ACLs, regional distribution, compression, CDN mirroring, versioning, DNS... If you move to Lambda, you're also tossing in the API gateway configuration, Kenesis streams, datastores, IAM permissions and roles, throttling behavior, scheduled tasks, VPCs, subnets... Just because you're not starting and stopping the processes doesn't mean you're not managing the server. /devilsadvocate
- icebraining 10y ago
  The things that actually fits best with the new serverless term is - shared hosting. Just FTP some PHP files into a directory, and it's running. Excuse me, I'm off to sell my marketing consultation services to GoDaddy and Hostgator.

by pbiggar 10y ago

nzoschke 10y ago

Strongly agree "serverless" is not well defined in general. > Reducing maintenance by not running your own platform This is my favorite technique too but it's nothing new. Heroku, App Engine and Lambda satisfy this for custom code. But I do agree with the author. Docker is not a service or serverless. Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos are all software in every sense. You install them on servers and you perform complex operations to keep them running well. Doing this unlocks all sorts of new utility, but it's the opposite of "use cloud services" in almost every way.

falcolas 10y ago

> if your backend is [...] S3, it's certainly serverless Is it really serverless if you have to configure the web server serving the files? If you have to manage ACLs, regional distribution, compression, CDN mirroring, versioning, DNS... If you move to Lambda, you're also tossing in the API gateway configuration, Kenesis streams, datastores, IAM permissions and roles, throttling behavior, scheduled tasks, VPCs, subnets... Just because you're not starting and stopping the processes doesn't mean you're not managing the server. /devilsadvocate

icebraining 10y ago
The things that actually fits best with the new serverless term is - shared hosting. Just FTP some PHP files into a directory, and it's running. Excuse me, I'm off to sell my marketing consultation services to GoDaddy and Hostgator.