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Spoiler alert: serverless is made of servers. But seriously what they mean is that you rent an allotted amount of resources on a server farm to run your applic

Spoiler alert: serverless is made of servers. But seriously what they mean is that you rent an allotted amount of resources on a server farm to run your application for a short period of time, and then the resources are freed again. Not all applications will fit this environment, such as any embedded databases, persistent connections, and so on.

Etheryte 10y ago
I never understood the naming for this trend. It's misleading at best.
- mattzito 10y ago
  I think it's that people assumed (as I did) that everyone would say, "Well, of course, there's not "no servers", because that would be like saying "computerless" or "processorless", but it is practical to say serverless and mean that you don't have to provision, administer, scale, or retire servers, nor do you have to pay for persistent compute resources rather than simply execution" But that's a mouthful, so "serverless" seems to fit the bill outside of what feels a bit like pedantry.
  - dualogy 10y ago
    > mean that you don't have to provision, administer, scale, or retire servers, nor do you have to pay for persistent compute resources rather than simply execution Given all the work this appears to save one, there's a curious explosion of "serverless" articles, frameworks, APIs, 'practices', crash-courses, workshops, talks .. ah well, par for the course with anything tech that gains a catchy moniker. (Perhaps that's why FP doesn't take off quite as much, "Monads" should have been called "Promises" 30 years ago, and Peano Numbers "numberless maths"!)
- collyw 10y ago
  Think of it as serverless pricing model.
- jbergens 10y ago
  I think "nanoservices" would have been a better name.
  - ultimatejs 10y ago
    nanoservices isn't specific enough. serverless has great meaning to initiated web developers. i for one know exactly what they mean by that and always did, whereas nanoservices, to me at least, could mean all sorts of things.

Etheryte 10y ago

I never understood the naming for this trend. It's misleading at best.

mattzito 10y ago
I think it's that people assumed (as I did) that everyone would say, "Well, of course, there's not "no servers", because that would be like saying "computerless" or "processorless", but it is practical to say serverless and mean that you don't have to provision, administer, scale, or retire servers, nor do you have to pay for persistent compute resources rather than simply execution" But that's a mouthful, so "serverless" seems to fit the bill outside of what feels a bit like pedantry.
- dualogy 10y ago
  > mean that you don't have to provision, administer, scale, or retire servers, nor do you have to pay for persistent compute resources rather than simply execution Given all the work this appears to save one, there's a curious explosion of "serverless" articles, frameworks, APIs, 'practices', crash-courses, workshops, talks .. ah well, par for the course with anything tech that gains a catchy moniker. (Perhaps that's why FP doesn't take off quite as much, "Monads" should have been called "Promises" 30 years ago, and Peano Numbers "numberless maths"!)
collyw 10y ago
Think of it as serverless pricing model.
jbergens 10y ago
I think "nanoservices" would have been a better name.
- ultimatejs 10y ago
  nanoservices isn't specific enough. serverless has great meaning to initiated web developers. i for one know exactly what they mean by that and always did, whereas nanoservices, to me at least, could mean all sorts of things.