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> Everyone in the industry knows in context what Serverless means. I don't. Divorced from the context of a very specific vendor offering, serverless could mean

> Everyone in the industry knows in context what Serverless means. I don't. Divorced from the context of a very specific vendor offering, serverless could mean almost anything. There are many applications, services, and platforms out there that don't require customers to manage their own servers. Now if we're talking about Amazon or Google's specific things that have the marketing term 'serverless' applied... then many (but not everyone) can start getting specific (like in this posted article). EDIT: I think another interesting question might be why so many people react defensively when this misnomer is criticized

deleted 8y ago
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grzm 8y ago
Likely because it's a pedantic, often futile discussion. Language and communication is descriptive, not prescriptive. Repeatedly trying to convince people that they're using words incorrectly when they are using them to effectively communicate gets very old. If you chose to use other words, by all means do so, but understand it may get in the way of communication, and that communication involves all parties. There are many words in all languages that when viewed from certain perspectives don't seem accurate. People drive on parkways and park in driveways. Going around in circles like this amounts to trolling.
- a_silly_name 8y ago
  You're right about the way language works, but how to probe the usage of a neologism like this without discussing (criticizing) the word? 'trolling' makes it sound like critics are acting in bad faith. : (
  - scarface74 8y ago
    They are dealing in bad faith when they post the usual retort - “why is it called serverless? Don’t you idiots know there are still servers involved?” Not directed at you, just speaking hypothetically. In the context of AWS... App/web servers EC2 — I don’t have to manage the underlying hardware but I still have to either overprovision to deal with spikes, setup autoscaling based on metrics that I define, write scripts to make sure that new instances in an autoscalimg group is up to date, deal with OS patches. Serverless - lambda - I give AWS a zip file and do a little configuration. It figures out how to autoscale. Build servers Same issues as above with EC2 and my build environment has to have everything every developer needs to build and one configuration can interfere with another developers build. Serverless CodeBuild - I create a Docker image of my build environment or use one of the prebuilt ones and tell CodeBuild to spin it up on demand. If 10 developers need to build ten different repos at once, No problem. When no one is building, no charges. Databases EC2 - all of the problems about the EC2 and I have to manage OS patches, database patches, replication, and backups RDS - removes most of those issues. Serverless Aurora/DynamoDB. You don’t have to worry about “instance sizes”. Docker. ECS vs. Fargate - same as above With lambda.

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grzm 8y ago

Likely because it's a pedantic, often futile discussion. Language and communication is descriptive, not prescriptive. Repeatedly trying to convince people that they're using words incorrectly when they are using them to effectively communicate gets very old. If you chose to use other words, by all means do so, but understand it may get in the way of communication, and that communication involves all parties. There are many words in all languages that when viewed from certain perspectives don't seem accurate. People drive on parkways and park in driveways. Going around in circles like this amounts to trolling.

a_silly_name 8y ago
You're right about the way language works, but how to probe the usage of a neologism like this without discussing (criticizing) the word? 'trolling' makes it sound like critics are acting in bad faith. : (
- scarface74 8y ago
  They are dealing in bad faith when they post the usual retort - “why is it called serverless? Don’t you idiots know there are still servers involved?” Not directed at you, just speaking hypothetically. In the context of AWS... App/web servers EC2 — I don’t have to manage the underlying hardware but I still have to either overprovision to deal with spikes, setup autoscaling based on metrics that I define, write scripts to make sure that new instances in an autoscalimg group is up to date, deal with OS patches. Serverless - lambda - I give AWS a zip file and do a little configuration. It figures out how to autoscale. Build servers Same issues as above with EC2 and my build environment has to have everything every developer needs to build and one configuration can interfere with another developers build. Serverless CodeBuild - I create a Docker image of my build environment or use one of the prebuilt ones and tell CodeBuild to spin it up on demand. If 10 developers need to build ten different repos at once, No problem. When no one is building, no charges. Databases EC2 - all of the problems about the EC2 and I have to manage OS patches, database patches, replication, and backups RDS - removes most of those issues. Serverless Aurora/DynamoDB. You don’t have to worry about “instance sizes”. Docker. ECS vs. Fargate - same as above With lambda.